11May

On Thursday afternoon, prochain ancien British prime minister Mister Tony YFWP Blair said,

I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That's your call. But believe one thing if nothing else - I did what I thought was right for our country.

Later that evening, Karen 2205 said,

Is it overly harsh for me to think; yes, I believe you when you say you thought you were doing the right thing, but that's not good enough. You are the Prime Minister; you have a duty to do the job properly, it's not a role where you can legitimately excuse your poor perfomance by saying 'I did my best' where your best falls far short of the objective standards of what was needed. And that's not a purely political point - I think there was an arguable political case for involvement in Iraq, the same way there was a good case for not getting involved. But you dodged the issue. You didn't engage with the unpalatable argument, instead you now appeal to the heart; 'I did my best' and fail to engage with the issues.

We propose to examine both statements thought by thought, starting with Mister Blair's.

(That analysis in full - 1128 words)

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Politics

9May

Some more thoughts on the future of socialism. In response to Sabrina Star's revolution within the revolution opinion piece, Violet argues that socialism has always been fighting in a capitalist (specifically, monied) environment.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland sees signs that rampant capitalism is falling apart. The UK has staked much on being the best European emulator of the American model. But if that model is looking jaded, where does that leave us?

Benjamin Barber argues that capitalism is infantilising the entire culture. In rejecting this view, Russell Jacoby actually argues that making things more difficult - the plethora of microscopically-different changes all hewing to the same theme - is capitalism's fundamental flaw.

Change for change's sake

The Interior Ministry (prop: John "Oh fuck not health" Reid) and Lord Chancellor's Office (prop: Charlie Falconer) have been put into a blender overnight. The net result is that most of the day-to-day administration of justice transfers to the Lord Chancellor's Office, which now wants to call itself the Ministry of Justice (prop: Charlie Falconer). The remaining tough-guy bits remain with the rump Interior Ministry (prop: John "Oh fuck not health" Reid), which we suppose will have to get a slightly less uncool name. This may have to wait until the current Minister of the Interior has resigned from the cabinet in the early summer.

Het Grauniad reports on a 2005 plan to shrink the Finance ministry by putting it and the Department of Productivity into a ministerial blender, and allocating the remaining bits between Gordon Brown and whoever is the minister for Trade and Industry this week.

Your Walking Undead This Week

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Politics

7May

Scotland

One from the Bad Losers department. The defeated Labour candidate in Cunninghame North is considering a challenge to the result. Allan Wilson lost the seat to Kenneth Gibson (SNP) by 48 votes, ensuring that the SNP took a 47-46 victory in the overall election. Why is this important? Cunninghame N is in the West of Scotland region, where Labour already enjoys an Overhang of one seat. If Labour succeeds in reversing the result, it will become another Overhangseat, and the SNP will not be compensated by an additional list seat.

More precisely, that is why the situation of uncompensated Overhangseats is so dangerous - it makes it far easier for parties to produce perverse and undemocratic results. Forty-seven more votes in one constituency would have turned the entire Scottish Parliament on its head.

Mr. Wilson would do well to remember Gerry Malone, whose defeat in Election '97 came too late for the re-run on BBC Parliament. Mr. Malone lost by precisely 2 (two) votes, and successfully petitioned to have the result overturned. His reward? Being on the wrong end of a Lib Dem majority of about 20,000.

Still on the subject of undemocracy, The Scotsman investigates why so many votes were discounted. Two Xs in the regional section, no markings at all, numbering rather than Xing - that's pretty fatal. Some of the reasons it suggests are open for challenge. Any mark in one box - whether an X, a tick, or a digit 5 - should be accepted, so long as it is clear, and does not identify the voter. The paper also suggests that a blank vote in the constituency section would invalidate the vote. If this is correct - and we have no evidence to confirm this actually happened - then it does expose the folly of physically linking the two ballots.

France

So, M. Sarkozy has won la Presidentialle. He will be formally inaugrated on 16 May. We stand by our initial reaction, that this will be bad news for France. His core policies - of putting the interests of capital ahead of those of people - have been tried elsewhere in the world. Almost without exception, these treatments have found to be the wrong prescription for whatever problems they were intended to solve. If M. Sarkozy attempts to impose these flawed and failed ideas on a hostile French populace, he will surely face the true face of French democracy - large, hostile crowds on the streets of every town and city, baying for the blood of those who would presume to rule them. Yet if M. Popup resiles from his commitments, he will rightly be slaughtered as an ineffectual politician, prepared to say anything to get into office, yet not actually doing anything once he arrives. It's no wonder that, in a show of Socialist support, the British Labour party welcomes M. Sarkozy with open arms, for they are similarly lustful for power, yet incapable of executing any action.

There are things to cheer about, and Johann Hari puts his finger on them. When every vote in every part of the country matters, those who would presume to rule us must be everywhere at once. They can't follow the Labour policy of targetting hard-working families and letting the singletons, infertile, and elderly go hang. Nor can they concentrate their effort into a couple of hundred patches of ground. Another cheer arose from the clear choice, the cleavage between the two parties. On the one hand, racist extremism; on the other, a settled if cautious life. It's not like the UK, where there are various packagings of the same fundamental idea.

And not trivialising politics, not reducing it to Westminster gossip, that's got to help. Take, for instance, the amazing result in Boston borough: C 5 (-7) Lab 0 (-11) LD 0 (-4) Ind 2 (nc) BBI 25 (+22) BBI GAIN The Boston By-pass Independents swept the board in almost the entire borough, with their main manifesto commitment being to lobby hard for a by-pass for the town. A single-issue group, yes. A group of intense local interest, yes. But this is the democratic engagement that far too much of Britain is lacking.

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Politics

5May

Welsh elections: Labour, we think, has done enough to retain power, though they'll need to rely a formal coalition with the Lib Dems. Part of that is due to the curious Overhang rules, which put Labour four seats closer to an overall majority than they deserve.

Scottish Parliament avoided a very quiet constitutional crisis by a whisker. We would have been shouting from the rooftops had Labour been the largest party purely because of their unadjusted Overhangseats. As it is, the SNP and Lib Dems cannot form a coalition on their own, and must rely on the support of the two Greens.

Scottish councils show some interesting detail, and put the SNP clearly ahead of Labour, with the Lib Dems and Conservatives roughly equal for third.

English councils: Overall the picture is of a slow decline across the board. Don't be fooled by Labour claiming that it wasn't as bad as expected - the party has scored about 27% of the national vote. It's up 1% on last year, but still a lower percentage than the 1983 general election.

The Conservatives have gains in places that traditionally elected Conservative MPs, and need to do so again for a Cameron government to form. A static vote ensures that this is a good result for the Conservatives, but may not be part of a flower-strewn path to Number Ten. There was some headroom to tilt at, and the Tories didn't progress.

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, continue to confuse. They've replaced Labour as the party of opposition in the south-west, but lost control of other councils to the Conservatives. They remain the only opposition to Labour in the urban north. They seem to be the second choice everywhere, but the winners almost nowhere.

Our current projection is for a Conservative overall majority of around 24, most of their gains coming in the suburban and rural areas of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the East Midlands.

The Conservatives are the party of the country, and of the London commuter belt. Labour is the party of the cities, particularly the urban north. The Lib Dems and Nationalists are the parties of protest. It increasingly feels as if none of the parties commands the majority of the country, and that the UK could follow Canada's lead, by electing minority government after minority government in a series of inconclusive elections.

(Detailed musings on each part and party - 1217 words)

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3May

We are assuming that all our readers who are in a position to vote in UK elections to-day have done so. We will not insult their intelligence by saying how important it is to vote, or mentioning how this is a fine spring day, perfect for burying bad government.

No, we shall give you advance notice of some interesting programmes on BBC Parliament over the coming week:

9pm Saturday - The French Presidential Debate. See for yourself how M. Sarkozy was almost punched in the gob by Ségolène Royal. And see the Amazing Chess Clocks of Doom - each candidate has 60 minutes to gather their seven keys and find the codeword to unlock the tiger's head. Or something. The live debate last night was more exciting than watching the Manchester Buccaneers lose, not that that match was televised.

10.30 Saturday (also 3pm Sunday and 8.30am Monday) From Beaconsfield to Baghdad - highlights of prochain ancien British prime minister Mister Tony Blair's career in parliament.

5.55 Sunday Patriot Games, Ruaridh Nicoll explains the negotiations between Scotland and England in 1707.

6.55 Sunday France Decides, the result from France 2. Also on TV5, for those who get it.

9am Monday Election 97 The third repeat in five years for this one. They've not yet done the 1959 election programme. Or the 2001 one. Anyway, INFAX programme-as-broadcast notes are 9.55 - 6am, 9am - 1.13pm, 2pm - 3.47pm. The Have you been drinking hemlock? interview will begin at about 9.17, and if you want to be Up For Portillo, tune in at 2pm. The highlights reel, featuring the extended version of The Legend of King Arthur will go out just after 4.45.

8pm Saturday 12 May Blair: The Inside Story Michael Cockerill's series on ancien Labour leader Mister Tony Blair, repeated in one night. Shame it's opposite Eurovision.

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Media

2May

We really are going to have to take Polly Toynbee out and beat her about the head. Hard. In her latest party election broadcast for the Labour party, she says:

Few ever hear how unlike Cameron speeches real Conservatives in action are. Tories are promising tax and spending cuts up and down the country if they win... In some places voting Lib Dem is the best anti-Tory tactic - but then from Birmingham to Redcar, Camden to Cumbria, the promiscuous Lib Dems keep Tories in power, so check out what kind of Lib Dems you vote for.

Thank you for mentioning Birmingham, the single best example of why ejecting Labour does actually work. After twenty years of one-party rule, Labour was turfed out here in 2004. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition represents the majority of the voters (something Labour could never claim in its two decades), and is handling the few matters still devolved to local government with a finesse and a dexterity that the squabbling red party could never manage.

Will a Labour wipeout make the next Labour regime turn left, or frighten them into caution? New Labour was born out of fear of the voter, seeing any setback as rejection of the left. What else are they to think if Labour keeps losing to the right?

Read our lips. Gordon Brown is a loser. L-O-S-E-R. His policies will be a mere footnote when historians draw breath from the constitutional turmoil created by the Badly Hung Parliaments of 2010, 2011, and 2013. What he thinks is a mere irritation; it's the multiplicity of smaller parties and special interest groups that will rise up under proportional representation that will feel the hand of history. Still, Polly's lack of perspective is only to be expected from an intellectual pygmy.

A mighty Labour thumping will only foster fears that there is indeed some ineluctable rightward tide.

Only amongst those who want to believe that there are bogey monsters under every bed, and that behind every silver lining is a dark cloud just waiting to get out. A group that includes Aunt Polly Toynbee, and that includes Gordon Broon. The old miseryguts is his own worst nightmare.

For a more sensible view, we turn to Rachel Sylvester in the Torygraph.

As Prime Minister, Mr Blair has made some monumental misjudgments - the war in Iraq, and the decision that political donations should, before the last election, be secretly turned into loans are two. His Government has, by his own admission, failed to live up to its over-inflated promises to transform the public services. He has faffed around with trivia - a ban on hunting and a house-seller's pack (first promised in 1996 and still not implemented) - rather than pressing ahead with things that affect people's everyday lives.

But, love him or loathe him, Mr Blair has one big achievement that cannot be denied: he has shifted the centre of gravity in British politics. There is now support across the political spectrum for the minimum wage, a publicly funded NHS, civil partnerships, House of Lords reform, childcare improvements and environmental reforms.

We suspect that Mr. Blair's much-vaunted legacy will be the squandered mandate. He had backing from the country to Do Something Different. Not only did he not Do Something Different, but he did The Same Thing, Only Without Any Common Sense.

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Politics

23April

The definitif results from the first round of voting:

Sarkozy, Nicolas (Popup): 31,18%
Royal, Ségolène (Socialist): 25,87%

Bayrou, François (Centre): 18,57%
Le Pen, Jean-Marie (Racist): 10,44%

Besancenot, Olivier (Postman): 4,08%
De Villiers, Philippe (Veritas): 2,23%
Buffet, Marie-George (Communist): 1,93%
Voynet, Dominique (Green): 1,57%
Laguiller, Arlette (Revvolution): 1,33%
Bové, José (Obelix): 1,32%
Nihous, Frédéric (Huntin'n'shootin'): 1,15%
Schivardi, Gérard (Loony): 0,34%

The regional breakdown shows some interesting variations. Sarko beat Royal in most regions, though there was a slim reverse in Acquitaine, Brittany, and Poitou-Charentes, and larger (5%) leads in Limousin and Midi-Pyrenees. Bayrou tended to run Royal closest in the north and east of the country, but could only take second place in Alsace. Le Pen's best result was in Corsica and Picardy (3rd). Ile de France (which contains 6.7m voters) split Popup 34 - Royal 28 - Bayrou 20. On Martinique, Royal beat Sarko by 15%, with Le Pen pushed into fifth by Besancenot. There are just 300,000 voters there. In New Caledonia (145,000 voters), Le Pen fell into fifth, behind Bové. Lowest turn-out came in the Overseas Voters category, just 40% of the 800,000 bothered to cast their vote; they prefered Popup by 38-30.

Where do we go from here? We go further! Stupid question... The election is already being cast as a referendum on the odious nature of Popups, which would be a mistake. There's a clear cleavage between the visions of the two candidates. There's a France that slavishly follows the cheese-eating attack monkeys of North America, as proposed by the UMP. Or there's a France that continues to tread a path of equality and fraternity, as proposed by Royal.

One thing is certain: the Chirac years have been an almost unmitigated disaster, with the country sleep-walking through a lost decade. That's why turnout was a phenomenal 85% yesterday - there was something to play for. Not that France Profonde sees it - we have five more years of the old left against right, both set in their predictable, unexciting policies, constantly bickering, automatically refusing the other’s propositions with knee-jerk lack of thought, simply to please their own vested interests. We'll have to see: certainly, a low turnout in the second round could bear out Mr. King's point.

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Politics