Grand Coalition of Folly

On the one hand it seems unthinkable that the two parties often seen as the opposing poles of British politics could form a coalition government. On the other hand it seems to make perfect sense. There is precious little difference in terms of policy, ideology or integrity. Both parties seem to govern with the notion that everything would be fine if not for the public. Both have hemorrhaged membership in recent decades as they have ceased to be organs of democratic governance and become essentially vote brokers offering a veneer of legitimacy to a sort of disorganised corporatism.

The very idea of it seems the stuff of nightmares - the two parties who have presided over a century of often farcical decline teaming up to accelerate their programme of ruin. From the Tories' misadventure in Suez to Labour's humiliating panhandling to the IMF, by way of botched nationlisations, botched privatisations, a mountain of debt and and an ill judged foray into continental politics which has been an expensive disaster, to the near break up of the United Kingdom. The two main parties have little to recommend them besides keeping the other lot out. And indeed when you speak to people intending to vote for either of the two main parties, that's the reason that seems to come up most often.

And you can see their point - a Labour government, spending and borrowing it's way to bankruptcy, would be a disaster. Even as a more natural conservative voter I have no interest in seeing Cameron win an outright majority either, which he would use to fudge and fiddle a referendum, setting the cause back decades.

Why then, would I be quietly hoping that these two parties, unable to form a government alone, form a grand coalition and share government for the next parliament?

Firstly they wouldn't be able to get anything done. Unless they were going to engage in a radical programme of spending cuts and rolling back of the state, and neither is even talking about it, then this is a very good thing. The constant infighting, squabbling and maneuvering would ensure that they couldn't do anything at all, allowing the rest of us to get on with things without further tax rises, stupid new laws or damaging vanity projects.

Secondly, it would dispel the popular myth that there is any worthwhile difference between the Conservative and Labour parties. In fact there are probably starker differences of opinion within the parties than there are between their respective leaderships, and actual important differences. The Labour party might be a bit more inclined to spend public money, and the Tories a bit more inclined towards privatisation, but both are thoroughly committed to the European Union, both have bought fully into the faith of climate change and are determined to keep pandering to the demands of this new deity. Both parties continue to stir up an irrational fear of Russia, Islamic terrorism and any other convenient bogey man to undermine civil liberties and the justice system and over play their own diminishing importance in international relations.

Thirdly though, and most importantly, they would both ruin their credibility at the same time. The bigger picture of British politics in the modern era is one where the two main parties take turns at mucking things up, while the other party capitalises on this to court the disaffected and convince the public that things would be so much better under them. After a few years this works and the other party gets it's turn at mucking stuff up while the party that was in government takes it's go at courting the disgruntled and making wild promises.

The net result has been a huge expansion of the state, economic stagnation and general national decline as the parties have sought to out bid each other during elections campaigns, by borrowing from the future. Now the future has arrived and it turns out that neither party can concoct an attractive enough package of benefits, tax breaks and spending boosts to make voting for them worthwhile to significant numbers of people. Meanwhile, in Scotland and Wales, nationalist parties have been able to offer this by blaming everything on England, and in England itself UKIP have started to call them out on this fraud. The Liberal Democrats, in their sorry desperation to get their hands on power have thoroughly shot themselves in the foot and are facing a meltdown in the forthcoming election.

So it seems to me that the best possible outcome is for a 'grand coalition' to take power, to prove once and for all that they are both as incompetent as each other, and that ultimately their supposed differences are not worth the paper they are written on. 5 years of doubly bad government, bickering and impotence might seem like a high price to pay, but if it opens the door to an election in 2020 with actual alternatives, and disabuses the public of the ridiculous notion that the fact that they have previously governed means they are fit to govern now, then it is a price that is certainly worth paying.

Sausage Roll Republic

In parts of Thailand and other Asian "democracies" it's quite common for candidates to simply buy votes. From a couple of pounds for a council seat to a bottle of £5 whisky plus cash for a parliamentary seat, straight out buying of votes is a fairly common practice. It's rightly seen as a shabby and cynical ploy which favours corrupt politicians with relatively cheap votes from rural peasants who probably wouldn't otherwise use them.

That is "treating." One of the strategies that corrupt and powerful elites use to keep a tight hold on their power and privelage in third world countries with large populations of ill informed people. The fairly crude method they use to do this is to drive around on election day announcing their offer through a megaphone. In the worst areas there have been allegations of them actually bringing ballot papers to ensure the vote is cast "correctly" once procured.

Meanwhile in Southampton UKIP candidate Kim Rose has been asked to report to a police station to answer the charge that he was using the same tactics to buy votes in the Itchen seat he is contesting in next month's general election.

What had this corrupt monster offered his would be constituents to pervert the course of democracy? A sausage roll. On the 21st of February, over 2 months before polling day, Rose had put on a party where for £2 entry there was some snookering of some sort with Jimmy White, tea, coffee and sausage rolls.

Now 3 weeks before the election it has been decided that this grave electoral fraud needs to be investigated, and as far as I can tell before police have had so much as an informal discussion with Rose about his actions, the national media informed.

Another tactic used by powerful third world rulers to keep hold of their power while maintaining a facade of democracy is to use the police, the civil service and the media to throw damaging accusations at potential rivals to discredit them and their parties in the run up to elections.

With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, it seems that the relevant legislation here is s114 Representation of the People Act 1983 which states that

“A person shall be guilty of treating if he corruptly, by himself or by any other person, either before, during or after an election, directly or indirectly gives or provides, or pays wholly or in part the expense of giving or providing, any meat, drink, entertainment or provision to or for any person—

(a) for the purpose of corruptly influencing that person or any other person to vote or refrain from voting; or

(b) on account of that person or any other person having voted or refrained from voting, or being about to vote or refrain from voting“

The person who receives the meat is also guilty of an offence, if he accepts it ‘corruptly’.

So make up your own mind whether a sausage roll at a party 10 weeks before an election is "corruptly influencing" people to vote for UKIP, or whether some quite different third world tactics are being employed to influence voters in Southampton and beyond.

A Case Study in Spin

This story about Max Levitas on Channel 4 News almost be a case study in spin

The bald facts - a home owner in a block of ex council flats has been charged for repairs and refused to pay.

Now the spin! Firstly the headline "from fighting fascists to fighting the council" while not directly equating the local council with fascists certainly gives a hint of that. The story continues in this vain, noting that Levitas was a veteran of the Battle of Cable Street, and was now rekindling this spirit to fight again, this time a demand from the council for the repair bills.

Now as the leaseholder of a former council flat, Mr Levitas presumably took advantage of the right to buy scheme brought in by none other than Margaret Thatcher, and since he has, according to the article, lived there for nearly half a century, he would almost certainly have done so at very favourable rates in the 1980s, and being in fairly central London will have profited enormously from this.

And where abouts in central London? They do actually mention it, in a follow beneath the original article. Mr Levitas lives in Tower Hamlets - perhaps the most left wing council in the country, controlled as it is by a mob of Labour and Tower Hamlets First, a local grouping founded by former Labour man Lutfur Rahman, with a colourful history to say the least. Not that the political make up of the council is especially relevant to the story, but it seems at least as relevant as the anti fascist credentials of Levitas in 1936.

Let's spin it the other way and imagine a property developer who bought "social housing" on the cheap and then got the council to repair it for them. I wonder if Channel 4 news would be quite so gushing about his "impressively sharp mind" or the "twinkle in his penetrating blue eyes."

A quick Google search shows that Max Levitas has had a colourful life. From defacing Nelson's column in 1934, through 15 years as a Communist Party Councillor, to more recently opposing the EDL's right to march in London. And not without having a dig at "the cuts" here in 2013.

So what is my point? Certainly not a character assassination, Max Levitas has had an interesting life, and he clearly has strong principles he has held for a long time. Nor is it to say that he is self serving, shirking his responsibilities or anything else - I don't know the nature of his contract with the council. Rather I suspect Max Levitas is being manipulated here for whatever drum the author Cathy Newman wants to bang.

The amazing thing is that Channel 4 News, which claims to be impartial and serious, and Cathy Newman who is a long serving and prominent member of their team, would put their name to such clearly politically motivated tripe, and that no-one would pick up on it and ask her to tone it down. And if they can do this for a minor story about a property dispute then what hope do they have of impartiality on anything that actually matters?

They may be a bit slicker and more consistent with their coverage of major stories but you can be absolutely sure they are putting their spin on every bit as much.

The Leadership Debate That Wasn't

Last week David Cameron and Ed Miliband, one of whom will almost certainly be Prime Minster after the election on May 7th, faced an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who a year after retiring from Newsnight has waded back into the fray to facilitate a "debate" between the leaders of the two main parties. The whole thing was an unmitigated farce from start to finish as they couldn't even agree terms for a head to head debate, so instead had a farcical interview with Paxman  in his best hammed up school master interview style. Thus we got to hear the absurd incoherent mumblings of Miliband and the slimey platitudes of Cameron saying essentially "he started it, Sir" on everything from cutting NHS funding to the ruinous levels of debt we have accumulated. Though both agreed that the main culprit was the banking crisis of 2008 - seven years ago.

It's often said that politics in the the United States is run by big money and lobby groups, and leaders are shielded from the rough and tumble Westminster style debate, but it would be pretty well unthinkable in the US that the electorate would not have a debate between the two main protagonists in a Presidential election. Since 1960 it has been televised, and it was broadcast on the radio before this. It's hard to imagine this sort of shambles taking place across the Atlantic, so why is it acceptable in the United Kingdom?

Well firstly it isn't actually acceptable here. It's a pitiful sideshow to most people in the country who regard pretty much all politicians with contempt and will grudgingly, negatively vote for one or the other in an attempt to keep their least favourite party out.

But it clearly is acceptable to the political establishment, who could have left an empty chair in Cameron's place, and otherwise poured well deserved scorn on his cowardly refusal to engage his opponents. The best explanation I can think as to why this woeful episode has passed off as a blip rather than a scandal is that it helps the entire political establishment hide from the uncomfortable reality that neither "leader" deserves to be taken seriously.

Ed Miliband is literally impossible to make any sense of, as he rambled and muttered his way through the interview, showing what the Daily Mirror called "passion" and what I would call confused anger, so common in socialists (he is) who can't believe that people might not share their bonkers world view that the best way of  making people better off is to make some other people worse off. His face was visibly contorting with anger at points, this quiet, bookish intellectual who can barely string a sentence together, less still make a coherent argument. To cap it all off, when asked if he was tough enough he gave some nonsensical story about how he had "stood up to the leader of the free world" over Syria, and replied with a cringeworthy "Hell yes" he was tough enough. It's the kind of thing Spitting Image would have him say.

At the other end of the scale David Cameron, already Prime Minster for 5 years, strings sentences together with an easy confidence, being only careful to ensure that they mean absolutely nothing. I'm quite sure it's possible to program a decent phone to answer questions in the style of David Cameron. It picks up on certain key words like "immigration" and spews out a load of meaningless statistics in a vain attempt to pretend not to be as inept and dishonest as everyone knows he is. When asked about his promise before the last election to get immigration down to "tens of thousands" before the last election he burbled on about immigration from outside the EU is down 13%. It's the equivalent of searching Google for "Lancia" and finding that there is a town of that name in Nevada. A passing curiosity but of little interest to people who actually care about this problem. He's like a car salesman faced with a blown engine - he can make the right noises and give vague assurances about the warranty, but any fool can tell that he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about and is looking for the cheapest, easiest exit route that won't hit his commission.

None of this is really helped by Paxman, who looked for all the world like a caricature of his former self, coming out of retirement to bolster his pension fund. His no nonsense style of doggedly holding his subject to the point remains effective, but he only seemed interested in employing it to pick over the candidate's records of failure, rather than getting any insight into what, if anything, either of them intended to do during the next parliament, let alone what any of them actually think.

And that of course brings us to the biggest failing of both of these so called leaders and the parties they nominally lead. They don't actually think anything beyond a deeply held belief that they should be Prime Minister. They both firmly believe in the NHS, they both think we need tighter immigration controls, and we need to reform our relationship with the European Union, and all the rest. But they don't have any concrete ideas for any of this, leaving us with the over riding impression that they don't actually believe any of it. They just know that they have to say this to get elected.

It would be more impressive if Miliband said that he thought we should put more money into the NHS, and we should tax people earning over £X to pay for this, or if Cameron said that we should actually charge a fee for visiting a GP. Offer voters a genuine choice of two different ideas which are actually based in reality and see which one they prefer.

The fantasy that this programme of tax cuts and spending increases, along with reducing our absurd levels of borrowing, can all be achieved by reducing waste in the public sector and clamping down on benefit scroungers is utter fantasy. Every government in my lifetime has promised the same thing, and as far as I can tell we have more of both than ever.

The "leadership debates" failed to live up to their name on both counts - there was no debate, simply a faux tough interview, and there was no leadership in terms of the figureheads of the two main parties offering any sort of vision or coherent programme for running the country. Instead it was simply more of the same impotent mewling that has replaced political discourse with a absurd auction of tax and spending moves that ultimately cancel each other out and produce an ever growing state sector, fueled by debt and perpetually underfunded, doing too much, badly and voting itself more money.

In Other News - Iceland

A little side story on the BBC News website mentions that Iceland has dropped it's bid to become a member of the European Union. I seem to remember their panicky and wrong headed application to join at the height of the financial crisis received a lot more attention. And what's more, the European Union don't even seem to have decided to blockade their ports or invade the island nation.

So what does Iceland, with a population roughly the same as Northumberland and little to export besides fish, have that the 64 million strong UK with the 6th largest economy in the world doesn't have, that makes us too small to survive outside of the failure that is the EU?

Je Suis A Pencil Sharpener

Amidst the chorus of righteous indignation and pithy cartoons which poured scorn in a fairly safe way on the attacks in Paris last week, this simple yet quite powerful image by the French artist Lucille Clerc (and not by Banksy, as many originally thought.)

The painfully obvious message is that you can't shoot freedom of expression, and we will come back stronger. The less obvious point, perhaps made inadvertently is that between the tragic breaking of the pencil last week and the coming back stronger someone has actually made a conscious decision to get a pencil sharpener out and sharpen the broken end. They haven't put an eraser on it, or forbidden that pencil ever be used to mock Islam, or even included guidelines on cultural understanding. They have sharpened the broken part so that the resulting two pencils can draw twice as much of whatever it was that offended in the first place. This is not so much a message of passive resilience to violent attack as it is a message of an aggressive and active response to an assault on our way of life.

So what should that pencil sharpener be? It's hard to imagine the sorry morass of faux "defiance" offered by most of the world's media, or retweeting "Je Suis Charlie" to a bunch of keyboard warriors is much help. This sort of weakness has been a defining feature of our supposed war on terror at home, and it has failed miserably. 

Terrorist spokesman Anjem Choudary, improbably writing for USA Today, made it very clear why the pencils are being broken: because the French government "allowed" the cartoonists to insult his prophet. This passage in particular leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever that Choudary is on the side of the shooters:

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, "Whoever insults a Prophet kill him."

Muslims, according to Choudary are obligated to defend Muhammad, and the punishment for mocking him is death. 

This view is, needless to say, simply incompatible with life in a liberal western democracy. There's no compromise to be reached and no qualifications needed. If you believe that, then you are placing yourself firmly on the side of terrorism. 

The idea that it is prosperous and stable western democracies who ought to change our way of life and centuries old political traditions to accommodate the views of maniacs like Choudary is absurd. These views are widely held in Nigeria and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Syria and they bring misery, poverty and violence to each of these places, on a scale which thankfully remains extremely rare in the western world. But not rare enough.

The sharpening of pencils needed is to stamp such behaviour out entirely and decisively. There is no room for compromise on this. Freedom of expression must be non-negotiable, leaving the only logical course of action for Choudary to move to a country where he is comfortable with the laws. Any yielding, any restraint or compromise of this principle is as good as a total surrender. It will simply make them stronger and more determined.

Choudary, like most of his ilk has been arrested on several occasions and given the usual meaningless fines and discharges, and carried on with his mission of trying to stir up a religious war in the west. In France last week they basically succeeded, briefly. In huge swathes of Africa and Asia they have succeeded already and the result is horrific. Consider that "in other news" last week some 2,000 people were feared dead in the town of Baga in northern Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram. We absolutely can not and should not tolerate it happening here on any scale.

When people are prosecuted for terrorist offences they must be viewed not simply as misguided fools who have gone off the rails but as enemy combatants who are a very real and immediate threat to the peace and freedom of the western world. Releasing them to continue in their holy war is utter madness and will only reinforce the notion that we lack the moral courage to stand for the beliefs and laws which have served us so well. 

Our pencil sharpener must shave away the vague and pathetic notions of tolerance, and the limp wristed folly that dictates that we ought to respect people's religious beliefs, however absurd and violent they are, down to a fine and focused tip unashamedly highlighting the superiority of an open and uninhibited society over the orgy of violence and destruction which fundamentalist Islam seeks to replace it with. 

The Religion of Peace Strikes Again

In Paris this time, with a savage attack on a satirical newspaper, killing 12 and leaving 4 more fighting for their lives. This was a very different attack from the shambolic siege in Sydney last month. A very organised and apparently professional assault on a specific target that was known to lampoon Islam.

The similarity is that once again a western government could have prevented this earlier if only they would take the threat of Islamic militants seriously at home before they start running around the world trying to solve problems they have no control over.

The gunmen have now been identified as Said Kouachi, born in 1980, Cherif Kouachi, born in 1982, both from Paris, and Hamyd Mourad, born in 1996. All French nationals, the younger man Hamyd Mourad has handed himself in to police in northern France. The brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi are still on the run, presumably armed and in no hurry to help police with their enquiries.

Already at this early stage it's known that Cherif was arrested in 2005 and imprisoned in 2008 for recruiting French nationals to go to Iraq and join the holy war against the Americans from his mosque in Paris, and was apprehended on route to Iraq to join them. He was arrested and charged again in 2010 in connection with a plot to break Algerian Islamist Smain Ait Ali Belkacem out of prison, where he is held for an earlier attack on a Paris commuter station.

Much less is known about the elder brother Said, except that he was living with Cherif at the time of his arrest, so at the very least can be presumed to have known about his brother's activities. What appaers to be his Facebook page here doesn't really paint him in a favourable light. And since this will inevitably disappear in the next few days, here is a screenshot

Remember that France has had two incidents in the last month of Islamist lunatics attacking the public, so you would think that they would be on their guard a bit.

So how on earth were these two allowed to drive into central Paris with assault rifles and carry out this awful attack? If I can find this information out in just an hour or so on Google how on earth can one of the world's most advanced nations with a formidable military and intelligence service and a history of Islamic terrorism that pre-dates the "war on terror" by some decades, be so utterly inept? And being this inept while the French military is busily engaged across Africa and the Middle East in conflicts that have little if anything to do with France is unforgivable. 

To be very clear about this, the blame lies only with those who perpetrated this atrocity, but the responsibility of the French government to protect it's citizens and maintain the peace was woefully neglected.