The FishTank

This time last year we were in fantasy land. A land where, despite the cold winds of recession still blowing across the country, Labour still believed that the growth fairy would come along and magic away the gloom. The evil Tories wanted cuts, but Labour promised largesse. Now, as the first tentative and vulnerable sign of a technical recovery has been sighted, the debate has largely moved on. Gordon Brown may still be pretending that he can get through to the election offering new presents like free broadband without a hint of where the money should come from, but his party have come round to the view that sometime soon there will have to be cuts. They may not want to admit where or how much, but they are prepared to admit they will happen.

With all three parties espousing some kind of redress, it is not unnatural that the battle lines have had to be redrawn. Labour’s have taken a two-fold approach: they have created a dumbed down argument intended to convince the hoi poloi and a slightly more complicated argument for those who think they know a little about how the world works.

The dumb argument is simple and simply dismissed. Our cuts, they say, will be nice cuts, the Tory ones will be nasty cuts. It’s transparent tosh and shouldn’t really wash with an electorate who have already seen the scrapping of the 10% tax rate clumsily portrayed as generosity to the poor. Those who always vote Labour will no doubt convince themselves of its truth, most will simply ignore it as the ramblings of a party spinning into its grave.

It’s the second argument that requires closer examination. Labour claim that the timing of the cuts matters. The surface argument is the same: nasty Tories are so keen to cut that they would cut before they have to, nice Labour will protect public sector spending for as long as they possibly can. The subtext here is that Gordon’s growth fairy may still render the cuts unnecessary. The deeper argument, for those with a smattering of economic knowledge, is that it is possible to damage the economy by cutting it prematurely.

At its simplest this is an extension of the Keynsian philosophy; the idea that it is possible to stimulate an economy by what appears, on the surface, to be unnecessary spending. If you pay one man to dig a hole in the road and another to fill it, you create two jobs, putting money into the pockets of two families and allowing them to spend it elsewhere in the economy. Unfortunately, the Keynsian model was flawed even in his time and is now positively dangerous. Take, as an example, a classic Keynsian implementation, the car scrappage scheme: a government already heavily indebted gives people money to buy new cars. People promptly take the offer – including some people who already intended to buy cars and would have done so with their own money – and buy, not British cars, but foreign ones. Some money goes into our economy through those employed in the retail trade, but the majority goes to companies in France, Italy and Germany, increasingly the producers of the most popular cars in the UK. The net effect is to increase government debt by funding the economies of other countries. All very generous, but not much use to us. Brown may have claimed to be leading the world when countries like Germany followed with their own stimulii, but would they have followed if they thought someone else’s economies would take the spoils?

And there are similar problems with paying people for non-jobs. In a country which exports more than it imports, giving more people more money to spend will naturally help companies at home. Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a country. We live in a country which imports more than it exports, and that means that more money sloshing around results in much of it going abroad. And with a pound weakened by increasing government debt, it may not even lead to increased purchases – it might simply be swallowed up by inflation.

Stimulating inflation isn’t entirely bad, of course. If the value of money falls, then so does the value of debt. The trouble is that if inflation leads to wage pressure and this is unfulfilled, it will tend to redistribute money from the poor (who have no control over what they earn) to the wealthy. And in a time of high unemployment, when few people are indispensible, the cards will all be in the hands of wealthy employers.

That’s not to say that government can do nothing. Properly targetted stimulii aimed at industries with a growing export base could help the country to take advantage of a weak currency and grow its markets abroad. Unfortunately, governments of all colours are appalling at business decisions of this nature and such targetting is therefore unlikely. What they have to do, therefore, is to create the conditions which enable market forces to achieve the same effect. This can only be realised by either improving the flow of credit or by creating tax breaks for businesses.

We’ve tried the former. That’s what the bank bailout was supposed to achieve. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, giving money to the banks has done nothing to increase the flow of credit. Unless, that is, it is the credit extended to the city slickers by their drug dealers. The money might as well have been burnt for all the good it has done. It’s true that we might get some of it back in time, but it’s not much help now. It was at one point suggested that government could resort to direct lending, but this would again require the Government to make decisions about which investments were meritorious, making it equally unlikely to succeed. The only real option is to reduce business taxation – the exact opposite of what Alistair Darling proposed in his last pre-budget report.

Because, of course, we don’t have the money to reduce taxes. Twelve years of fiscal incontinence have left us far worse placed in this recession than we should have been. Of course, Gordon Brown trumpets the fact that our debt isn’t the worst in Europe relative to GDP, but that’s like telling a man with cancer that at least he isn’t dead yet. And it’s not just the debt that matters: the deficit – that is the amount by which we overspend on an annual basis – is not simply amongst the worst in the developed world, it is the worst in this country’s recent history. To gloat about the debt and ignore the deficit is to fall from a plane without a parachute and brag about how high above the ground you are. If we don’t tackle our deficit, it won’t only increase our debt, it will also increase the interest on our debt and thus, in cyclical fashion, increase our deficit further. To coin a phrase we can’t go on like this.

So, if we are to reduce taxes we have to do one of three things: increase other taxes, ignore our debt or cut spending. Increasing other taxes would be difficult. The headline grabbing measures to soak bankers and impose a new 50% band on other wealthy people will generate very little, partially due to tax avoidance, partially due to the fact that there aren’t as many rich people as you’d think. The Lib Dem proposal to bring capital gains tax into line with income tax would raise more, but in a weak economy it could also lead to a flight of capital and further unemployment. Increased taxes on those earning less than a fortune could be just as damaging, leading to a contraction in personal spending and a corresponding weakening of companies with significant domestic markets.

Ignoring our debt would be even more dangerous. Forced to the IMF, we would lose control over our economy. Whilst it could be argued that our government have already done that, it is at least marginally preferable to have decisions on the economy taken by people who actually live here, rather than international busybodies who care nothing about the damage their decisions make in the lives of ordinary people.

Which leaves us with cutting spending. Obviously you can’t just take an axe to it, but to deny there are massive savings to be had is to deny that the Government doesn’t waste money. And boy does the Government waste money. A recent examination of the finances of London alone found 15% of government spending was wasted in tasks either useless or duplicated elsewhere. If replicated across the country, this would mean that the deficit could be smashed without cutting a single front-line service. And that’s before you get started on completely pointless government initiatives such as local council climate change officials, equality counsellors and so forth. Government departments like the Treasury have massive hierarchies, stacked full of management whose only job is to facilitate communication between the levels above and below them, not because it helps in anyway, simply because it means those on the lower levels can see a career path. That’s why with the privatisations of companies like BT and British Gas there were so many redundancies: the public sector had bloated them with non-jobs, which, much as with  the ailing Royal Mail, rendered them uncompetitive in the real world.

Which leads us to the question of when you should cut. Brown would prefer not to have to cut at all: many of the non-jobs he has presided over have been created simply to hide his failures in regional development. In Scotland and Northern England there are significant populations dependent on public sector jobs. Cutting would have to come alongside relocation of departments in an attempt to prevent the ghettoisation of whole swathes of the country. Obviously there’s never a good time to make masses of people unemployed, but this could be an opportunity: if the Government were to move from  a policy of work for work’s sake to redevelopment and business stimulus through tax cuts, then people could be moved from pointless government jobs to infrastructure projects that made it possible to create thriving business communities in our depressed areas. Encouraging inward investment from richer areas and, with the weakened pound, even from richer countries would allow us to use the recession as a chance to retool for better times. And if you’re going to take that kind of measure, the right time isn’t later on, when the economy has recovered and the currency rebounded, but now whilst it’s still attractive for foreign investors to put money into the country.

One of the reasons we still matter as a country is that we still have world-leading businesses. In banking, telecoms, specialised quality manufacture, software and entertainment we do matter. And this comes about because it is in our country’s DNA to innovate. What we’ve had under New Labour is a period in which innovation has been stifled by a high tax economy, wrought to create a client state to mask the problems of long-term unemployment. To reverse this we need lower taxes and investment in the regeneration of areas outside London. Yes, a high-speed rail link to Leeds might be nice for people who want to work in London and live as far away as possible, but business parks and links to ports and airports would allow Leeds to use its talents in Leeds and export to the world. Facing up to Brown’s debt mountain, the time may not be ideal to launch a belated recovery of the regions, but it’s a fantasy to believe that we will find a better opportunity by simply waiting and allowing our finances to further stagnate whilst a generation of despondent youths grow up believing themselves to have no future. In the aftermath of the Depression it was the countries who took risks who prospered; after the Second World War it was likewise those prepared to seize the day with both hands who became the richest. Britain is historically capable of such feats – it falls to government to simply unshackle the bonds of commerce and free the entrepreneurial spirit to bring life back to our nation.

It’s election season, and in a period already filled with echoes of 1979 it seems that class warfare has once again reared its head in the SW1A postal district. Is reinventing a strategy which hasn’t worked for Labour in forty years really something that can succeed in a modern context?

Class is, of course, something poorly understood; neither politicians nor pundits seem able to get a handle on what it actually means. Brown regularly confuses it with wealth, a confusion not dissimilar to his other problem in being unable to separate debt (the amount we owe as a country) from deficit (the amount we overspend in a year as a country). Perhaps it’s a lame attempt at politics, but it makes you wonder if all those Labour MPs who were lauding Gordon Brown as an intellectual titan in 2007 were themselves unable to tell the difference between intellectual argument and plain ranting.

Class, as understood by nineteenth century Britain, was nothing to do with wealth. Indeed, such was the profligacy of the upper classes in late Victorian and early Edwardian society that many of the upper classes were debtors. Being upper class they naturally avoided prison – unlike their less elevated fellow down and outs – but the point was that class was about something beyond mere money, it was about being able to trace one’s lineage back to that original bunch of slash and burn politicians – the Normans.

We don’t really talk about lineage in that way anymore. The decline of the country estate and the decimation of ancient families in two world wars robbed class of its obviousness. Youth culture ended automatic deference and so class became something people talked about without really knowing what it was. It became little more than an idea.

Except, of course, for those trappings that remained. There are, after all, certain things that everyone tends to associate with class: going to public school, speaking with proper diction, and here it would seem that Gordon Brown has Cameron and his colleagues bang to rights. Until, that is, you scratch beneath the surface. Cameron has what we used to call blue blood, certainly, but George Osborne – his right hand man – is from a family which gained wealth through a successful business. William Hague, likewise, has come from humble origins to success on his own terms. There may be more than a dozen millionaires in the shadow cabinet, but few – if any – have been handed that wealth without at least some spadework of their own.

In former days this would have been little defence. The leading lights of the Industrial Revolution garnered their ‘new money’ not simply by dint of intelligence, but by a complex web of patronage and social connections. Those born in the Limehouse gutter couldn’t even dream of such success, let alone use their brains to acquire it. That’s why people like Marx and Lenin were able to align wealth and class in the public perception, creating the idea that simply having money meant you were more privileged than the masses. The politics of envy was born from those men, and when allied to what were then genuine grievances about the conditions of the working masses, those ideas gave rise to the British Labour Party. For the best part of ninety years, Labour steered a difficult line between Marxism and the politics of aspiration until the day when Tony Blair abandoned Clause 4 and essentially ditched socialism in the knowledge it no longer held the keys to Number 10.

Why did he abandon Clause 4? Because things had changed and not due to Labour. The key development was that of Universal Suffrage – a by-product of the carnage of World War One. It capped a century of political reform that saw Westminster go from a gentlemen’s club where aristocrats enacted laws for self-enrichment to the place where professional politicians went to ride the gravy train, staying aboard largely by dint of currying favour with the working masses. It took time to roll across our society, but roll it did. By 1948 every politician knew who kept him in a job. Labour may crow about their social justice in creating the NHS in 1948, but the truth is that all the major parties had it in their manifestos. Only a victory at the polls put Labour in the history books for its creation.

Because with suffrage came the key driver of change: social mobility. As people aspired to a better life, so the politicians who found means to deliver it would prosper. University education became something for anyone with brains, professional jobs for anyone with qualifications, wealth for anyone prepared to put the effort into acquiring it. The end of conscription, the rise of consumerism and the pill completely redrew the social contract and by the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, the solidarity of the working masses had been reduced to a rump of unions, perceived by many other low-paid but aspiring workers to be little more than greedy good-for-nothings who held the country to ransom out of self-interest. Labour, in supporting whatever the unions demanded, made themselves unelectable for a generation.

So why turn the clock back now? What possible reason could there be to believe class is back? Ask most people what class they are and most, nearly all, would see themselves as somewhere in the middle. Even those people who choose to live on benefits wouldn’t define themselves as working class – much less an underclass. Ask them what they think about people being wealthy and they will be relatively equivocal: there may be groups of the rich – politicians, bankers – who are acceptable targets for opprobrium, but people who become wealthy through luck or celebrity will be considered perfectly fine – as a class.

And that’s why class is a dead argument. In Victorian Britain, the hardest working deadbeat couldn’t hope to become middle class, now even those who lounge around on the taxpayer’s pound can aspire to instant and extravagant wealth. To attack those who have succeeded in acquiring wealth is to attack the future people want. To criticise a rise in the threshold in inheritance tax as ‘just for the wealthy’ is to tell people that, if they do succeed, the government wants to claw it all back. Cameron may still have that mountain to climb in gaining popular support, but in the end it has nothing to do with his class. In fact, it has more to do with the tribal instincts of those who see Thatcher as a hate figure, and the scepticism of those who think that any politician who presents himself as well as Blair must be equally crooked. If Cameron succeeds in overcoming these obstacles and delivering on his promises, he will do a great deal to rekindle the popularity of aspiration and to finally bury the remnants of the Marxist cadre.

Trying to find any objectivity in the current row over the NHS is like looking for a spare liver in a man with scirosis. What we have – broadly speaking – is a bunch of Americans with no experience of the NHS claiming we more or less use the National Lottery to decide who lives and dies, whilst Britons – who have equally never used the American health service – attack a system alleged to allow poor people to die for lack of insurance. Daniel Hannan, a man who does at least appear to have thought about the problem, is only one step from being burned in effigy, and half the nation is twittering about how wonderful the health service is. This being the same service that, when the Americans aren’t attacking it, they spend all their time whingeing about.
I could be equally emotive and claim that the NHS killed my father or that it attempted to condemn one of my friends to a wheelchair. But I think that exploring the issues objectively will do more to advance our understanding of healthcare than simply airing grievances.
My father suffered his first heart attack on Boxing Day in 1982 at the age of 37. He was rushed to hospital and spent some six months there before dying of another heart attack three days before what would have been his 38th birthday (and, just to add an emotive barb, on my sister’s birthday, the day after my brother’s). He could have been saved: bypass surgery, commonplace today, existed in specialist London hospitals at the time, but the decision was taken not to send him. Whether this was due to waiting lists or some kind of financial calculation is unclear, but given his youth it was unlikely to be any kind of risk assessment.
Fast-forward to the last decade and, as New Labour would undoubtedly point out, heart attack deaths have been significantly reduced by targetted funding. But that doesn’t mean the NHS is now functioning perfectly. A friend of mine suffers from serious muscular problems which were deteriorating and would require physiotherapy to keep her mobile. She was told the funding would not be made available, meaning she would end up in a wheelchair (and thus eligible for incapacity benefit costing more than her treatment). Her local MP fought the issue in Parliament and, eventually, she won the right to treatment. But it wasn’t an easy battle and the outcome was frequently in doubt. Other, less determined people would have given in and accepted their fate. Other, less conscientious MPs would have done less to help.
Neither of these cases suggest a system that’s in perfect health, but for each such example of failure there will be many others of success. One has only to look at the “we love the NHS” outpouring on Twitter to see that. And I don’t denigrate that emotional attachment; it’s simply that reducing the argument to “the NHS saved my life” or “the NHS lets old people die” is over-simplifying the issue and preventing genuine reform. Daniel Hannan’s mistake is not in the fact he criticises the NHS, but in the language he uses to do it. The NHS is not ‘a mistake’ and it doesn’t need to be scrapped. If you change the way it works it can still have the same name – saves the cost of a new logo at least. Reform is an easier pill to swallow, even if it technically amounts to a total reboot.
Get beneath the rhetoric and you’ll find the real debate is about funding. How is money raised and how is it allocated. This matters because, without infinite funds, there has to be a measure of rationing. My father’s death and my friend’s battle against incapacity are both instances where that rationing appears to have resulted in the wrong decision. In our system there is one big pot raised from general taxation, largely allocated in response to central government dictat and allocated by targets. In the US system, by contrast, there is a complex web of insurance schemes, providing individual pots for each citizen who can draw on them according to need. Despite the enduring myth, the US system does have a measure of state support for poorer citizens (in fact the US government spends more per-capita than we do), but as with our tax credits system, the complexity of the allocation system means that some people do end up uninsured. Even here, however, US hospitals have a legal requirement to save people’s lives, although there will be limitations on how much they are prepared to spend to do so.
The reason the Americans cling to their system is that, particularly for the right-wing rich, there is a feeling that it is wrong for a citizen who has paid for healthcare their whole life to be denied treatment because their allocation has been spent on somebody else. Somebody who has squandered their money rather than invest in their own future. In the UK, by contrast, we take the view that not everybody can afford the true cost of healthcare and our general principle of taxing by ability to pay and providing by need is fairer and simpler. Hannan’s preferred Singaporean model sounds superficially very similar to the American one, only with better protection to prevent people falling through the cracks.
But is that better? In terms of efficiency, probably not. We already have a tax-collecting system, so an independent means of collecting tax for healthcare, even one for taking money from central taxation and reallocating it, would undoubtedly cost more in administration. The US system is also an engine for profit, with health-insurance provision a lucrative business. Clearly, if companies are getting rich from your taxes, not all of the money is going to pay for your health. On the flip-side, the advantage of an insurance-based system is that the amount of money allocated to health is directly based on the wealth of the country: the costs of care for the elderly become less of a problem when those elderly people have been accumulating a fund for their own care their entire working lives. It does away with the debate being reduced to which party cares enough to put more money in, but fundamentally it achieves very little in the way of efficiency and – as we saw with Brown’s pension grab – there’s nothing stopping a government in tighter times using a tax to raid a healthy looking insurance fund. National Insurance was originally supposed to be just that – an insurance scheme – but it didn’t take long for government to see it as another source of revenue. You could have a privately run national insurance scheme, but it’s a thankless choice, like choosing who you’d prefer to burgle your house.
In terms of allocation, there is a superficial attraction to insurance. After all, if taxation means that everybody’s pot is either the same size or at least a certain minimum size, how could that go wrong? Quite easily as it turns out. Take the case of the long-term sufferer: for example, another friend of mine, who since childhood had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. He died of bowel cancer in his late thirties – this time the result of a delay in diagnosing his condition – although, again, I don’t know if the cost of testing the condition was a factor. Under an insurance based system, this friend could well have been worse off: the continual demands on his fund in treating Crohn’s could have left his fund too small to handle the cost of treating his cancer. And, since regular periods of hospitilization made it difficult for him to develop a career, even if he could have found the funds to save his life he could have been bankrupted by it – a situation not uncommon in modern-day America. Meanwhile, a luckier person could be in possession of a full state-funded insurance pot until killed in a road accident never having used the money. The money could be fed back into the system, certainly, but wouldn’t it have been better to save the life of my friend with it first?
Because of the diverse threads of our lives there simply is no magic bullet for allocation. Even if you try to tackle elderly care by assuming that most people live to old age and should thus establish a fund for it (what we used to call assurance) you run into the debate we’ve been having recently about whether it is right that a hard-working frugal citizen should be expected to sell their house to pay for care whilst a profligate wastrel receives the same care for free. It’s clearly not fair to rob people of their hard-earned assets (our equivalent of bankrupting patients), but equally unfair to say that people should simply live as long and as well as they can afford. Try to allocate funding evenly in the name of fairness and you generate waiting lists, target it to deal with specific regional issues, like heart health in Glasgow, and you are accused of creating a postcode lottery. It’s an intractible problem.
Intractible, but not beyond improvement. Because the real problem with our NHS isn’t how it receives its money or how it allocates it to patients but how it wastes it. Too many bureacrats whose jobs are simply about delivering favourable statistics to the government of the day; too many nationally tendered contracts for equipment; too many dodgy PFI deals allowing businesses to profit from the construction of hospitals; too much money going to drug companies who can whip up scares of pandemics in order to dump huge amounts of Tamiflu on the market. If half the money wasted in this way could be saved it would be a massive financial boost to the nation’s health. If the NHS narrowed its focus, ditching fashionable treatments like unnecessary cosmetic surgery, IVF and homeopathy there would be more money in the pot to help cancer sufferers and provide physiotherapy for those with muscular conditions. If services like the blood transfusion service were required to charge at cost, rather than run at a profit; if government-backed university research produced drugs that were provided to the NHS at cost; if local hospitals could source their own equipment and change supplier according to the market at the time… There are countless initiatives that could make our NHS more cost-efficient and thus mean it has to make fewer hard choices about what is truly fair.
Hopefully, by the time we get to the next election, the current furore about the health system will have died down a bit. Because what we don’t want is a continuation of the last twelve years, where success has been defined by the amount of money poured in and fairness by the conditions which grab the most positive headlines. Curing the NHS is not about feeding its addiction to money or treating its more obvious symptoms, it’s about getting to understand what is actually wrong with it. And that can’t be done whilst everybody is just arguing about who cares for it most.

The Great British Pub is dying, so they say. But is it? And if so is that death something to mourn, a positive sign of a citizenry less obsessed with drink than the tabloids would have us believe, or just more evidence of the pernicious rise of the supermarkets?
Britain is a country very much in love with its myths, and the myth of the pub as social hub is one such treasured falsehood, created by nostalgic stories of wartime Britain and perpetuated in the post-war soap operas like Coronation Street and Eastenders, which almost invariably focus on the pub as the centre of local life. The implication is that, without the pub, there would be no social cohesion and the Blitz community spirit would die. The truth, not unnaturally, is somewhat different. The war was, after all, a period in which the pub was in decline, a decline that had been going on since the turn of the nineteenth century. The war gave pubs a boost, particularly when they served as rallying points for volunteer groups or places for blitzed refugees to hide out, but this was not how pubs were seen before the war. In fact, if you look at the nineteenth century they were frequently seen as hotbeds of sedition, places where Marxists and Trotskyites would gather to plot the end of polite society. With the war giving pubs a relaunch, and the soaps popularising them, pub culture has been both rebranded and reinvigorated in the late twentieth century, but that’s not to say that their role is any more significant to society than it ever was.
Because people don’t, as the myth suggests, tend to create social circles at the pub. They go to the pub with an existing social circle (such as families, work colleagues or fellow students). Where social groups centre on a pub (as with rotary clubs and other charitable groups, for example) it is more often that the pub serves as a convenient venue than as a catalyst. The reason pubs work so well in this regard is not simply the presence of alcohol, but because historically pubs are more tolerant of customers who spend a significant amount of time on the premises without spending a great deal of money. The average fast food chain would undoubtedly try to eject people who were still ensconced an hour after their burger was consumed. In fact, in the eighteenth century, our coffee shops had a similar tolerance to those who lingered, creating a refuge for the great figures of the Enlightenment, people like Samuel Johnson. They gave us, for perhaps the only time in our history, something that approached continental cafe culture.
The lack of this ‘cafe culture’ is often decried as a sign of Britain’s unhealthy obsession with alcohol. It’s not even a recent accusation: Roman writers characterised the British as a people with an unhealthy obsession with beer. But whilst there always have been particularly British problems with what we now call binge drinkers – people who in Hogarth’s time might have peopled Gin Lane – the truth is that the Brits are not particularly heavy drinkers. Research suggests that Germany and Ireland consume vastly more beer per capita than Britain. And whilst France may prefer wine, in terms of units of alcohol, they consume about 50% more than we do. Even within Britain there are ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas, Scotland and Northern Ireland consume more per capita than London and the North East, which in turn consume vastly more than rural districts. The universal beer-fuelled collapse of society is little more than media invention.
The picture in regard to the decline of pubs is equally distorted. It’s easy to forget that it was less than ten years ago that people were complaining not of pubs closing, but of banks closing to become pubs and wine bars. Look around many of our urban centres and you will find a former bank that is now a Wetherspoons, a Yates or one of the other rising pub chains of the twenty-first century. The truth is that pub numbers hit a peak in the heady optimistic days of the early 2000’s and a decline is probably to be expected. That the pubs closing are not the ones that were opening is due to shifting trends. Heavily urban centres like the Medway Towns, for example, used to have a great many pubs that were basically terraced houses. These were extremely popular when a pub was a refuge for the working man to escape the family for a private drink, but they are too small for groups of social drinkers or dining families and have been declining for decades. In rural areas, by contrast, larger pubs which started as coaching inns have prospered by becoming, in effect, budget restaurants. In fact, some of the pub closures will be accounted for by those rural pubs which have gone all the way and now operate entirely as restaurants. People still go there, staff are still employed, but they have changed from a place to drink with some food to a place to eat with some drink. It’s hard to see why this should be a problem.
That’s not to say there aren’t some pubs which have less obvious reasons for their decline. Changes in population demographics mean that, whilst the population of the country has risen, some rural villages have depopulated; better communications mean that people may be given to travel rather than stick with a poorly-run or presented local; and changes in behaviour and technology mean that people don’t feel they have to go to the pub just because they want a cold drink. The availability of alcohol in supermarkets is not a cause of this but a symptom. The fact that you can get a can of beer with a widget that makes it similar to draught from your local and then keep it in your fridge creates a demand and the lower overheads of selling in this manner means that people can enjoy a drink at home for less. Should we baulk at this? Would you complain that supermarkets sold cheap food because restaurants were closing? At the end of the day, it is not the duty of government to prop up businesses that are dying due to lack of public support, it is for those businesses to adapt in order to attract more custom. These are not public services.
That hasn’t stopped the pubs angling for change. Go into your local and you will no doubt find beer mats emblazoned with ‘axe the tax.’ Because this is what the pubs see as their panacea – the 33% that goes to the Exchequer with each pint sold. Would it help? Well, if you mean would it bring people back to failing pubs, probably not. The tax on beer may be levied on the consumer, but it’s unlikely that any pub would pass on the full cut. Their margins would increase, making them more profitable, but in terms of customer numbers the effects would be marginal. People who are attracted to cheap drink will still opt for the pub chains who discount heavily, those who are food oriented will not change their habits based on the price of a drink. There is a case for arguing that some people stay away from the pub because they can’t afford it, but that’s an issue about overall taxation. Cutting beer tax in preference to, say, income tax would hardly send a positive message.
And what about supermarket loss-leading? Should supermarkets be bound by legislation to prevent them selling at below cost? If so, why shouldn’t the bigger pub chains be similarly bound? There is a myth operating here: supermarkets do not sell loss leaders out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want people to buy lots of a particular product. They don’t even do so to buy loyalty – customers are notoriously fickle and just as likely to shift their custom as the stores shift their prices. Supermarket loss-leaders are an economic decision based on the idea that most people buying a loss-leader will go on to buy other, more expensive items at the same time. Yes, some people will just buy the alcohol, but with the loyalty card data they collect supermarkets know this is not generally what happens. Most people who buy cheap alcohol from supermarkets do so as part of a larger shop. The alcohol might draw them in or it might be something they pick up anyway (hard to work that out purely from sales data) but the end result is they were there for more than just the drinks. This means that unless pubs start selling barbeque equipment or groceries the supermarket will remain more convenient and price rises are more likely to lead to a decrease in overhaul alcohol purchasing than an ancilliary trip to the pub.
Alcohol purchased in supermarkets is symptomatic of that behavioural shift again. People do not, for the most, drink simply for its own sake. They want to drink with a meal or whilst they watch the match. Those pubs which have identified these elements, the gastro-pubs or the sporting pubs with the big-screen televisions, are doing well. Family-friendly venues with children’s play facilities are also enduringly popular. There may be other markets to explore – perhaps twenty-four hour drinking could allow for a general election night special where people gather to have a few drinks and snacks and watch the Government get a drubbing – but doing nothing and expecting government action to prop up the local is not the answer. The ideas are there for innovative businesses to find.
In the end, pubs are neither the lifeblood of our society or our economy. That they employ a great many people is because there are a great many of them, but that doesn’t mean government should act to keep them viable. In a recession there are always interest groups talking up their importance to garner government patronage. Some of them rightly get help, others wrongly so, but for pubs either individually or collectively to expect a bailout would be no more right than for Woolworths to have expected to be nationalised. Those who feel strongly that individual pubs should survive would do best to encourage custom themselves. If making the pub busier or more family-friendly makes it less attractive to the concerned individual perhaps they should ask themselves for which society they are hoping to save it.

With the last PMQ’s of the session over and done it’s interesting to reflect on what the last few weeks have shown us. After months of varying political tactics, David Cameron has, it appears, found a trick that works. To wit, he takes one government policy area – anything will do – and picks a single question that Brown doesn’t want to answer. Then he pursues it doggedly, typically using all of his questions to ask the same thing. Naturally, he doesn’t get an answer, but the next week he moves on to another question and begins the process again. Brown is unable either to parrot government statistics or to claim he is facing a lightweight who doesn’t want to talk policy. He fumbles, struggling to avoid answering the question, leaving press and public with the impression of a man who is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.
Tactics are all very well, of course, but outside of the Westminster village why do they matter? They matter because, for the last few years, first Blair and then Brown have been using their own formulaic strategy for handling debate. In the early years they simply blamed everything on the Tories. It no longer washes, but they still had to say something. The most typical question asked of a failing government – other than in planted questions from their own side – is essentially why some area of policy is failing to improve the lives of a member’s constituents. Why is my hospital being forced to close wards? Why are my constituents’ children dying in Afghanistan? Why is law and order broken in my back yard?
To all of these Blair and Brown have one response. Not to answer the question, but first to trumpet how much money they have pumped into the relevant policy area – sometimes with specific figures for the constituency in question – and then to claim that this money was opposed by the questioner’s party. The money argument may have lost traction in the current recession, but the claim of opposing government policy still seems to have resonance.
And you might say that it isn’t unreasonable. After all, the Conservatives can hardly complain about ward closures if they were against extra investment in hospitals. They can’t complain about child poverty if they opposed SureStart. But that’s the trick: New Labour’s tactics are premised on the position that theirs is not only a policy that can deliver, but that it is the only policy that can deliver. The problem is not that the Conservatives had a different view on how to deal with terrorism, but that they opposed an extension to detention without charge. It’s a strategy that has been used for everything from NHS funding to 90 day detention, from the recession to the recovery, and it’s damaging our administration.
The reason this is damaging is that a government which takes this line cannot – without serious political damage – change their position. Blair used to say he had no reverse gear – not because he couldn’t think of another direction to go, but because he wouldn’t admit he’d gone in the wrong direction in the first place. Brown likewise cannot admit his failings as chancellor, despite the necessity of doing so in order to solve the problems he faces as Prime Minister. The my way or no way strategy may make for effective political grandstanding, but it’s absolutely lethal for policy. Governments need to be able to admit mistakes because – let’s be realistic – they always make them.
And it is this more than anything else that is causing Gordon Brown’s paralysis. After twelve years of failed policy, claiming all money thrown at a problem was, in and of itself, a solution, he has nowhere to go. To admit to reducing spending is to deny his previous claims that any such cuts would be disastorous to front-line spending, automatically closing schools and hospitals with every penny saved. He can try to rebrand his U-turns, making out that targets in schools were effective and that he’s scrapping them as the next part of an ordered plan, pretending that real-terms cuts are zero percent rises, but every such statement damages what little credibility he has and makes his career and that of his party that bit shorter. His only hope is that, somehow, circumstances will produce an economic miracle before the election. It’s woefully unrealistic, and with every week that Cameron picks apart one piece of his policy his stock sinks that little lower. From a possible hung parliament in 2007, he is now looking at what is potentially the end of Labour as a political force.
For us, of course, the war is far from over. Whoever takes up the reins after the next election we have to hope they will learn from the New Labour experience that politics is about more than despatch box strategy. We have to hope that Cameron, despite proving effective at opposition politics, concentrates more on policy than political tricks if he gains office. He’ll have a term of good grace if he hits the floor running, but he has to have proper answers ready when the questions come. If all the electorate hear is blame laid at the feet of the previous government, the cycle of political despair will simply begin all over again.

It’s not been a pretty week. Alleged political shows have been filled with more fake emotion than the average film awards ceremony, with faded celebrities – desperate to boost their public images – all adopting the same line in indignation and egocentric paranoia.
The story, of course, is the alleged bombshell of News of the World phone tapping. A practice which has surprised nobody exposed through a story which hasn’t been news since 2007. The Guardian and the BBC, along with an entourage of ‘oh, I remember her’ type celebrities are raking over the ashes in the hope of sparking a political funeral pyre for Andy Coulson and, through him, David Cameron. Why? You may ask. Although the reasons are various, underlying them is one word: desperation.
For the Guardian and the BBC the desperation is financial. Both organisations realise they stand to lose money under a Conservative Government: the BBC through David Cameron’s root and branch review of quangos, the Guardian through the announcement that its revenue stream of highly lucrative government job adverts will be going elsewhere. Scenting the loss of so much money, editors and overpaid political hacks alike are desperately blowing on the embers of the story in the vain hope of a spark. The BBC is aided in this by Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, who presents two of the politics programmes making capital out of the subject. Neil, who has pretended scruples by pointing out his former attachment to the Murdoch press, appears to be attempting to settle old scores by taking a hatchet to his former employer. An employer from whom – if Wikipedia is to be believed – he departed under something of a cloud.
And if the motives of the journalists are suspect, those of the celebrities are even more dubious. The launch of a belated class-action suit against News International speaks of a financial opportunism that makes the MPs look positively humble. After all, there seems little doubt that the six figure settlement alleged to have been given a few years back is what has led to the goldrush now, and no doubt specialist solicitors are thinking about how much of that might come to them. The trouble, of course, is that big out of court settlements are only given when a newspaper wants to avoid fighting a case in which they are unsure of their facts and want to avoid the publicity. With the publicity already garnered and the celebrities clearly not aware of any damage up until this point, there’s very little for them to gain.
The two trundled out on Andrew Neil’s political shows are cases in point: Selina Scott, formerly a journalist herself, seemed to be somewhat confused about what the allegations were. Her attack on the News of the World for allegedly fabricating a story about her was all very well, but what’s it got to do with phone tapping? Why would the press pay someone to tap a phone and then make the story up anyway?
Vaness Feltz, meanwhile, played a case study in narcissim. There’s no evidence that her phone has been tapped, but she seems firmly convinced that the Press are so interested in her every move that they must have. After all, how would they have known when her daughter was in hospital that she would visit her? Quite. After all, it’s not as if the fact the child was in hospital would have been a tip-off. Or that the media could, just could, have been there ambulance chasing. Ego clearly plays a large part in all of this.
And that’s why public sympathy simply isn’t with the celebrities. The Daily Mash, running a satirical piece on the subject, made the point that the public don’t care how the press get their stories as long as they get them. It’s probably not entirely accurate, but when you have celebrities who have, when it suited them, courted press attention, possibly even revealed salacious details of their lives themselves, you can be forgiven for being less than sympathetic when it backfires. One has only to recall the farrago of the Douglas/Zeta-Jones wedding photographs to remember just how pathetic some of these people are.
All of which isn’t to condone the actions of the journalists involved. After all, when faced with someone who simply wishes to pursue a career in entertainment, why should they then be expected to spend every minute in the public eye? Why can’t their private lives be private? For most celebrities it is, of course: newsworthiness is not an automatic product of fame. Some play the papers for their own gain: for some it backfires, for others it provides little more than a brief period of popularity. There’s also the argument of the public’s right to know: public figures who preach standards they couldn’t possibly be practicing, or who expend vast amounts of effort trying to keep their expenses secret should not be surprised when the media start digging. Sometimes it is arguable that the media cannot get to the truth without breaking the law, particularly in instances where the police are involved.
It’s hard to legislate public interest, of course. There is a distinction between things that the public should know and things they merely wish to and it is unlikely this could ever be robustly enshrined in law. After all, would John Major’s affair with Edwina Currie really have mattered politically? Did David Blunkett’s pecadillos mean anything before he started bending the rules to please his partner?
What we can say is that the press should not be allowed to print lies or to use illegal methods to gather information on those with no government function. Some of this is already illegal, which is why the journalists in the News of the World scandal were tried and convicted. Measures to ensure newspapers can’t use big money to defend against libel suits and to ensure that retractions are given the same prominence as the original stories would go some way to redressing the rest of the balance.
And there it should end. Because, at the end of the day, this is a story several years old. The Guardian itself admits there is no new evidence in their story. That’s why the CPS won’t reopen the case, no matter how many innuendoes the BBC makes about miscarriages of justice. For journalists, politicians and celebrities to continue to pursue the matter, whether for financial or political gain is little more than rank hypocrisy. After all, what difference is there between pursuing a closed case with no new evidence and following a celebrity home after the interview has ended?

The totemic issue of the year to date has, without doubt, been the small matter of MPs expenses. The scandal has swamped the news, claimed the careers of dozens of MPs (no matter how many of them claim to be stepping down for family reasons) and caused one of the greatest upheavals in recent electoral history.
Over a month since the Telegraph began its revelations, however, the reform of the system seems to have been redacted from the political radar. Westminster has turned to other matters, seemingly content that the debate has moved on. But with the feeling still lingering amongst the public that MPs consider themselves a class apart, should something still be done? And should the expenses be the nettle that is grasped?
There is, of course, a balance to be struck. Whilst the public were (and indeed are) right to be angry at the way in which their money has been hijacked to give their representatives the good life, the sums involved have been fairly small in the grand scheme of things. Fred Goodwin’s pension they ain’t. And there is an oft overlooked distinction between those who have claimed for legitimate but petty expenses like scotch eggs and those who have actively defrauded the system by claiming on completely arbitrary houses or entirely fictitous mortgages. Yes, some of what is currently legimitately claimable shouldn’t be, but to argue that all expenses are bad and to axe them all, as seemed likely at the height of the furore, would be a reaction no better than simply letting things stay as they are.
In tackling the issue, however, we need to look not simply at the expenses themselves but at the more fundamental question. Why did it happen? If MPs do not, as they have repeatedly claimed, go into politics out of self-interest then, in comedian Jeremy Hardy’s words, what happens to them in that building?
The Jeremy Hardy quote was actually in reference to the Peter Hain donation scandal in 2008, but it seems equally relevant now. Talking about the subject on BBC’s News Quiz,the really telling phrase was when he said ‘I used to know him.’ A man he once regarded as a friend had become estranged.
Of course, the pair could simply have lost touch – we all lose a few contacts as we go through life – but with both being prominent and eminently contacable people this seems to be a matter rather more than simply a lost telephone number. What is more likely is that Peter Hain quite deliberately lost contact and allowed himself, like most politicians, to become a social isolate inside the Westminster bubble.
Because it’s important to remember politicians do, as a rule, start as ordinary people. Few of them have actually fought their way out of the slums, but most do start without the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. They aren’t bred somewhere special. And this means that they start with the same kind of social circles as the rest of us; perhaps with more politicised close friends, but still with a smattering of normal people around them. Once elected, however, it’s easy to see how that can change: politicians have a similar problem to lottery winners – once in office, friends and relatives will see them as a path to their own personal aggrandizement; people who were once happy to stand them a pint or thirteen at the pub will suddenly start to prod them about why the tax on those pints are so high. And then there are the friends who, fun though they may be in ordinary life, risk causing political embarrassment if the tabloids find them out doing something embarrassing or speaking their mind as a friend of a noted MP. Politicians sever ties to protect themselves. They allow old friendships to lapse in order to safeguard their careers.
More importantly they also gain new friends. Their orbits change to encompass high-earning businessmen, journalists and – in the New Labour world – celebrities, all of whom live a life far removed from normal people. Surrounded by such a surfeit of wealth and influence, it’s no wonder that MPs suddenly see themselves as hard done by.
It’s also why they make some of their most blatant political mistakes. The sceptic might see the ten pence tax debacle as a calculated action based on pitching middle-class greed against working-class ignorance, but for the small amount of tax revenue it generated it seems too blatant a political risk – unless we allow for Gordon Brown being an even bigger fool than he outwardly seems. No, it makes much more sense if you see the issue through the eyes of someone who has pretty much forgotten that ordinary people exist. MPs whine that they earn so little not because they think repeating the mantra will make it an article of faith for us all, but because they themselves really believe it. Genuinely poor people are, to them, an academic abstraction, a mere statistic – they don’t really exist.
So, if our MPs have left for Planet Rotschild, what can we do to bring them back down to Earth? You could go for a nice headline-grabbing initiative like anchoring MPs salaries to average earnings, but that probably wouldn’t have more than a short-term effect on our representatives’ emotional memories. No, what is needed is to ensure that MPs remain in touch with their electorate. I’ve suggested before that we cut back on pointless legislation. Doing this will give our MPs more free time, making them more or less a part-time legislature. They should use that time: far from dropping their second jobs, as Brown’s anti-Tory strategy insists, MPs should be actively encouraged – even forced – to fill their time with other roles.
Not convinced? Think about it. Brown has, in recent weeks, professed to a desire to be a teacher. Put aside your fears about him teaching his view of economics or history; if Brown spent time as a supply teacher, he might understand the problems of education; similarly if Harriet Harman put in some hours on a Tesco checkout, or in a bar, or any one of the other part-time jobs that many women do, she might understand the real reasons why they aren’t all queueing up to be MPs or bank bosses. Michael Portillo’s belated political awakening came, not when he lost his seat, but when he took on the role of a single parent for a reality television programme; Ian-Duncan Smith seems vastly more relevant now having spent eighteen months researching the real world for one of David Cameron’s policy reviews. We need our MPs to understand the real world, and the best way to do that is if they immerse themselves in it. They’ll even earn some extra cash, but – and this is significant – they’ll realise how little most people actually earn for what they do.
Where does that then leave the expenses? Should we maintain the status quo, secure in the knowledge that our MPs will learn the error of their ways? I think not. The expenses regime is not simply a problem because of the way it has been manipulated, it was purposefully built up to compensate MPs for what they saw as inadequate pay rises. But MPs are already paid three times the national average income; that they need us to pay for their every whim is clearly blatantly ludicrous. Take, as one example, food: how can being an MP make their food bills higher? Do MPs have to eat more?
Expenses should, like the MPs themselves, be adapted to fit in with the real world. How would a private company compensate an employee who had to travel with work? Would they buy him a second home? No. Would they clean his moat or build his duck island? Obviously not. They would pay travel, and per-diem rates for accomodation, and even that only when the employee had to travel more than a certain distance. Perhaps the regularity of parliamentary sessions means there’s an argument for providing dormitory accomodation – which is rare in business, but potentially cheaper to the taxpayer. But whatever approach is taken it must be based on the notion that expenses are just that, expenses – not a second income. Fundamentally, what our MPs need to learn is that they are there to serve us, not to line their own pockets. And that means they cannot be allowed to profit through the expenses scandal and they should get closer to reality to reconnect with their electorate.

Caroline Flint’s departure from the Cabinet seems to have started a spate of discussions about the glass ceiling. Some say there is still a conspiracy to keep women out of the top jobs; others that the biological imperative remains the true bar to progress. But is there another, subtler reason? Why, four decades after the pill, do we still not appear to have equal employment?
It’s certainly not education. Reports over the last years have suggested that girls are regularly outperforming boys in school. The reasons for this are manifold and poorly misrepresented as ‘girls are smarter than boys’ but the fact remains that, with the current mix of subjects and teaching methods, girls are scooping more of the prizes. Shouldn’t this translate into better career prospects?
In fact, evidence suggests that it does. Statistics suggest that, amongst the 18-30 category, women are – on average – paid more than men. This isn’t a like-for-like comparison, scoring women in a given role against men in the same role, but then neither are the statistics that say there is a pay gap: Harriet Harman’s claims of a 23% pay gap are largely predicated on the fact that more women work part time than men – and no sensible person would suggest that a woman working a few hours a week in a bar or a supermarket should be paid the same in total as a man who works forty hours as a teacher.
A detailed analysis may be inconvenient to Ms Harman’s gender-centric agenda, but it’s actually vitally important. Understanding where women are working may help to explain why they aren’t working in the – apparently much desired – boardroom jobs on which the whole glass ceiling concept is predicated. For example, if many women under thirty are actually working in small businesses, they have little prospect of being promoted onto the board of a completely different company. No more prospect, in fact, than the men who work in other smaller businesses.
So far so hypothetical, but given that some 80% of Britain’s GDP comes from small businesses, the raw statistics would suggest that there’s where those better paid young women are likely to be. The attractions are obvious: control of your own hours and destiny are vital to someone who doesn’t want to sacrifice their every waking moment for a pittance granted by a dictator who thinks there is nothing outside of their business that matters. Because, let’s be totally honest, that’s what it takes to rise to the top of a large company: you have to get yourself noticed as a ‘team-player’ and that invariably means demonstrating a willingness to put aside personal life in favour of personal ambition.
There are some women who do this. There are women in the top ranks of some FTSE companies. Not many, it’s true, but that doesn’t demonstrate that women can’t do it, simply that most don’t. Conventional wisdom dictates that this is because women want children, that somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties their biological clock takes precedence over the one on the boardroom wall. There’s something in that, of course, but what of those women who don’t have children? Why aren’t they in the boardrooms? Or what of those who somehow manage to have both? Where do they fit in?
It’s easy, living in our complex modern society, to believe human beings have gone beyond their animal origins. Animals don’t commute, they don’t clockwatch and they don’t have careers. But, scratch away at the designer labels of the business suits and every human being is still an animal underneath. Even if we don’t realise it, our animal traits still inform our thinking. Feminists tend to miss this point when they derisively ascribe the success of men in high-intensity industries to testosterone, but fail to recognise that maternal instincts prevent many women from putting aside family in favour of career. Underneath it all, genetics still matter.
And when you think about the societal groupings of mammals carefully, a lot begins to make sense. All mammal species have certain common traits. They tend to form tight family groups with two parents. One, usually the mother, takes the role of nurturing and defending the young. This makes them empathic, but aggressive when under fire. The other, usually male, parent is left to provide, requiring tenacity and a degree of aggression in acquiring prey. Natural selection favours those who excel in their given role and thus pre-programs one sex to act in a particular way and the other to be attracted to those who do it best.
Applying that to our modern world, you will see that women favour men who aspire, who are prepared to dominate in order to provide. This is as true in the boardroom as it once was in the hunting-ground, making rich or powerful men attractive despite what might be seen as physical deficiencies. It also means that men are more likely to aspire to be rich or powerful, putting themselves through a great deal of physical or psychological stress in order to make the grade and maximize their attractiveness.
Conversely, men tend not to be attracted to women in power. It’s not that men are afraid of powerful women, simply that a woman who usurps the bread-winning role is one who is more likely to put personal gain above the needs of her young. This means that natural selection tends to favour women who do not take risks to aspire to positions of authority.
All this might seem like stereotyping, but that’s precisely what natural selection is. Male greenfinches are green not because it’s fashionable, but because in their evolutionary niche female greenfinches will tend to avoid the ones who are less green. Many of the advances that have allowed women to avoid the roles in hearth and home have taken place relatively recently: the bicycle, the vaccuum cleaner and the pill are all products of a single hundred year period – a mere nanosecond in evolutionary time. People have changed as a result, but as the selection pressures fade it will take many generations before mutation produces a significant number of women with more interest in aspiration than family, and if they choose not to have family their genes will never become common.
So what does this mean in terms of policy? It means that the glass ceiling is largely self-imposed. Not entirely, of course – there is still some discrimination – but positive discrimination will not persuade women who lack aspiration to put themselves forward, merely allow forward those whose ability discriminates against them. You can’t force women with potential, to put themselves through the mill when they have no interest in it, so there’s no short-term fix for the problem. In the long-term, if we feel we want a society in which more women take top jobs, the right policies will be those which enable women to balance their time better, to have their children later and to have a decent work-life balance. There will also need to be policies that enable men to spend more time with their children without sacrificing their careers. This might mean society makes sacrifices – fewer hours worked – but if it leads to a happier, more balanced society, then it may actually boost productivity.
And where does all this leave Caroline Flint, minister with transparent portfolio, and what the Press call her L’Oreal promotion? Well, I don’t know the honourable member well enough to assess her abilities thoroughly, but I would say that the hopeless manner in which she has managed a succession of cabinet roles suggests not a woman who is being held back, but one who has been pushed too far forward. There are capable female politicians out there, but she’s not one of them and I think, if her promotions have been the result of positive discrimination, our current equal opportunities policy may need something of a rethink.

With political reform at least on the agenda for discussion at the moment (I remain unconvinced we’ll actually see any) now seems like a good time to start a series of pieces looking at what is wrong with our politics and, more importantly, what we can do to fix it. We start with one of the core problems of the last ten years – manifesto pledges.
Two accusations you will frequently have heard levelled at New Labour over the last ten years are that manifesto pledges have been broken or, conversely, that the Government has introduced a policy that, had it been in their manifesto, would have lost them votes. Sometimes these accusations are independent of each other, as with the fox hunting ban that took so long to enact, or the reform of the House of Lords that is still being promised now; sometimes the two are inately linked as with the imposition of student top-up fees – a policy in direct contravention of a specific manifesto pledge, or the rise in National Insurance that was used as a way of side-stepping a specific promise not to raise income tax. What is little understood is that the latter of these two accusations is not always true. Manifestos are huge bulging documents, deliberately designed to be too dense to read, allowing governments to claim a mandate for enacting policies that most voters will not have realised they have tacity endorsed.
In the real world, of course, politicians cannot restrict themselves to legislating only what they have promised. Had Iraq genuinely been on the verge of attacking us in 2003 it still would have required a parliamentary decision to take military action and it would have been wholly impractical to be forced to a general election or a referendum first. There is something to be said for true democracy being political impotence.
But there is also much to be said for politicians’ inability to distinguish between representing the electorate and ruling them. The deliberate obfuscation of policy promises is used, not because politicians are bound by their manifesto commitments, but because they want to claim a semblance of legitimacy for policies they are determined to enact regardless of public opinion. To the Browns and Blairs of this world it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether voters are opposed to a given policy – if the Labour Party could get them through the Commons soon enough after an election, the hope is that they will have become lost in spin before people had a chance to vote their endorsers out of office. The failure of the protest marches to prevent the Iraq war demonstrates just how little public opinion matters in the shaping of government policy.
So why make such chubby manifestos? The obvious answer is to deal with the real enemy – the enemy within. For political parties like Labour, the danger comes not from the public – or even the opposition benches, but from their own backbenches. Whilst many MPs are content to pass the time rubber-stamping whatever policy comes their way, never bothering to listen to – much less consult – their constituents, there are some who have that rarest of attributes – a political conscience. These are people who will stand with the opposition when they feel their government is doing the wrong thing. And it doesn’t matter how much the media smear them as rebels, they are actually doing what they are employed to do.
The trouble, of course, is that most MPs don’t read their own manifestos. When they go round canvassing for your vote, what an MP is technically doing is promoting the vision set out in their manifesto. Vote for me, they say, and this is what you get. Which means that if an MP is returned at a general election they are tacitly committing themselves to support anything their party leadership cares to put in the manifesto document – even if they haven’t read it. This is, in most cases, enough to deter rebellions.
It isn’t, however, enough to protect the public from bad policy. Parliament’s role is supposed to be to scruitinise and debate legislation. When a government floods the house with dense legislation, often smuggling extra details through in appendices which don’t even get debated; when they restrict the time in which MPs are allowed to argue the points; that’s when they strip away our liberties. A piece of legislation going through the house at the moment, for example, gives the police the power to confiscate personal property prior to a charge being brought, thus effectively allowing the police to commit smash and grab raids without so much as suspicion of guilt. Earlier legislation has allowed baliffs automatic access to property with much the same effect. This kind of politics, fundamentally, is the cause of the gradual decay of our civil liberties in recent years. We need constitutional measures to prevent it.
How do we do this?
Firslty, we need smaller manifestoes. A manifesto should be a statement of a party’s direction in broad terms the public can understand. It can make specific pledges, but these should be in language that is clear, simple and not subject to misinterpretation. MPs should be able to view the manifesto before deciding whether or not they are prepared to stand on the basis of what it contains, and be able to make the choice to leave their party if agreement cannot be reached.
Once an election has been fought and won, the next important element is that backbench MPs should be given proper time to consult and debate. Acts of Parliament should be presented to the house in their entirety – not with supplements sidestepping the debating chamber – and MPs should be allowed to send back legislation on which they cannot achieve clear agreement – without the threat of the whips. If something was clearly in the manifesto, then there needs to be a clear reason why an MP who endorsed it should vote against it, but there should be allowance made for fresh information or changes of circumstance.
Finally, all legislation should have the chance of recall. If, after going into the field a piece of legislation is found to be ineffective or open to abuse, backbench MPs should be free to table motions to repeal them. Such debates would have to take their turn, but if a government isn’t filling time with pointless legislation this should be perfectly possible.
Finally, we need to change our thinking about government. It is not good government to pass laws every day of the week, to create thousands of new criminal offences that are impossible to police. Scott Adams makes a good point in his Dilbert books when he says that if a company is running well there should not be much management to be done. The same is true of a country. We need a shift in our perception to realise that if a government is legislating endlessly it probably means it doesn’t know what it is doing. Good government is lite government and we should be wary of MPs with too many promises.

After a lengthy sabbatical, the FishTank is back, attempting to go beyond other blogs by daring to be constructive about as well as critical of our society. Since the political landscape of the last few weeks has been somewhat littered with the corpses of Westminster’s cosy assumptions, it’s a little hard to know which particular beast to bury first. Should I assault the duck houses and lay siege to the moated manors of the Conservatives, flip my lid about Labour’s taxpayer-funded attempts to profit from the property market or run with Vince Cable’s hunt as he calls for the head of Alistair Darling? Perhaps that’s too easy. I start today, therefore, with a look at Nick Clegg’s new old idea – proportional representation. Is it, as some believe, a panacea for all our political ills, or is it just a cynical ploy by a party who see it as their only way into power?

One thing it certainly isn’t is an obvious way out of the expenses fiasco. It’s hard to see how the representative balance of Wesminster could influence the venality of its incumbents. So why bring it up now? It’s clear that in shifting the debate, Nick Clegg has displayed an opportunism of which – let’s be honest – none of us believed him capable. And he has led the reform agenda: Cameron was quick to follow with his own initiatives, Brown slowly followed with his vague aphorisms about commitees to investigate possible future reform; everybody has taken the chance to leap onto the passing bandwagon in the hope it might bear them out from the dangerous country in which they find themselves.

Of course it won’t do that either. Wesminster may be blind to the fact, but the nature and intensity of public anger over the expenses is a new and dangerous thing. People who never even batted an eyelid over the Iraq war, who may not have even bothered to vote in 1997; these people are talking politics as never before. And they aren’t happy.

Yes, most people already suspected MPs of being dodgy, but to have it confirmed – and on such a scale – is like having suspicions about your daughter’s sex-life confirmed by finding her blue movie debut in the local Blockbuster. And whilst even if an MP did admit fault, apologise and give the money back it might not quiet the clamour, the insistences of MPs that everything was ‘within the rules’ serves only to intensify it. People are livid. And these are people who, whilst hardly political sophisticates, nonetheless fail to see any connection between how their MPs are elected and how deeply their snouts are in the trough.

But that’s not to say it’s a bad time to look at the issue. Certain ideas, such as the right of recall, do have a certain attraction at a time when people are desperate to wreak revenge on people who see political office as little more than an expense account. Redressing the balance of power between the Prime Minister and Westminster, as David Cameron suggests, also sounds positive in the light of the presidential Blair and Brown tenures.

Proportional Representation is not quite so obvious. For those who don’t know the system, it works something like this: people cast their votes at election not for a person, but a party. On the surface this doesn’t seem much different to what happens now: most people have little engagement with their local MP and vote based on what they see or read about the more prominent party members – usually the leadership. Where PR differs is that, when the votes are counted, it is not the local MP who benefits. Instead, parties operate lists either regionally or nationally, and MPs are selected from these lists to serve in accordance with the proportion of votes cast. If voters are allowed to cast more than one preference, their second and third choices may also have some impact on the numbers elected.

And this is why it’s attractive to Nick Clegg. In election after election, the Lib Dems have come second in seats up and down the country, whether because people want to protest at the sitting member, or because they genuinely want the Lib Dems to win. On paper, PR would increase the number of Lib Dem MPs significantly, possibly even creating a semi-permanent Lib Dem majority.

On paper. Because voting intentions are a bit more complicated than that. Like particles in quantum physics, people alter their actions based on how those actions are observed. Someone who might vote Lib Dem in protest might reconsider if they thought it could actually make a difference. In all likelihood the Lib Dems would see significant gains in their first election under PR; it’s what they did with that advantage determines whether the advantage would remain.

But even that would, we are told, be an improvement. Under ‘First Past the Post’ we have had nothing but Conservative and Labour governments, after all. This can’t be representative of the will of the people. People living in safe seats do nothing to alter the stability of the government, whilst those few in marginals have all the say.

Only that’s not strictly true, of course. The reason we appear to have a two-party system is simply that the debate of the age is generally fairly one-dimensional, whether it is Protestant against Catholic, as in the Seventeenth Century, landed gentry against mercantile interests as in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth or the working masses against oppressive industry as in the early to mid-twentieth. In all of these cases the era’s politics have been very much them and us. Even in the last few years, the debate has been mostly framed in terms of upholding public services against reducing the tax burden. In such a system any third party would struggle to find an unique voice.

Which is why it took the Labour Party so long to achieve government. The collapse of the Liberal Party – Nick Clegg’s forebears – in the 1920’s created a climate in which the political axis could be blown over. Suddenly, the opposition were the Labour Party with an empowerment agenda for the working class. The Tories were forced to change their own approach to deal with it or risk appearing irrelevant. When Labour went into the wildnerness in 1979, a Lib Dem party who managed to frame a relevant debate could have been the party to take office in 1997 instead of Tony Blair’s rebranded New Labour juggernaut. Even four years ago, when the Conservatives had just lost another election and were being treated as irrelevant; if, then, the Lib Dems had gone on the offensive over civil liberties and political reform, they could have caught the public mood and, by now, be on course for number 10.

So would things be better under PR? Probably not. If you have a government of factions and interest groups what tends to happen is that the issue lacks narrative. Shifting coalitions based on internal politicking lead not to constructive policy based on a central idea, but to a weather-vane following whichever way the political wind seems to be blowing. Europe, where PR is a more potent force, has attempted to address this by finding bigger issues that can seize the narrative voice by the jugular (one of the reasons for climate change politics in the EU), but even this has failed to override the various conflicting interests and what little consensus there was has fallen apart under the bigger issue of global recession.

Nick Clegg probably knows all this. PR is, for him, a means to an end and, if Labour do follow the polls into third place after the next general election, you can guarantee the subject will slowly die away. Cynical? Perhaps. But consider this: the right of recall is another Clegg attempt to steal headlines. It sounds great: if five percent of an MPs constituents are unhappy they can demand a bye-election. Now consider this: if we have PR and MPs are chosen from shortlists by party leadership based on votes across the country, which five percent of the people need to vote to get which MP out? The Lib Dems are often criticised for their inconsistency, but this must be the first time they’ve tried to sell us a policy that is actually mutally contradictory.