Nick Clegg must hang...

Sorry, meant to write a title that reflected the contents of this post, which is about AV, but that kept floating through my mind.

Anyway, AV referendum, eh?

Not quite as hardcore but I'm more or less with Paulie on the subject of referendums.

With Nick Cohen when he argues that AV is this orphaned child that actually no-one wants - as if there wasn't enough reason not to have some stupid referendum on the subject.

Not with Sunny at all with this short-term strategic bollocks about how it would look 'unprincipled' for Labour to oppose it. This from someone who advocated a vote for the Lib Dems and is now striking a pose as the voice of opposition? Gimme a fucking break...

With various people who think it is a stupid idea to have it the same date as the Scottish elections but not with those who use this form of words:

"Scottish ministers reacted with fury this morning after it emerged that the UK Government intends to hold a referendum on proportional representation on 5 May next year – the same day as the Scottish Parliament elections."

The government is not planning to hold a referendum on PR because AV is a majoritarian and not a proportional system. Honestly. If I can be arsed, I'll vote 'no'. More probably spoil my ballot paper by scrawling the words, 'Nick Clegg must hang' across it.

Rebranding the Conservatives

Some in the party think this is necessary - in Scotland, that is:

"Conservativehome.com, which has strong links to the upper echelons of the UK party, suggested new names to change the Tories' image such as the Scottish Unionist Party, the name until 1965; the Scottish Freedom Party and the Scottish Reform Party."

I wish them luck with that. Actually, I don't. The Conservatives do seem to have a particular problem in Scotland, over and above what you might expect from the make-up of Scotland's electorate in terms of the proportion of our population that work in manufacturing industry and the public sector and live in 'social housing' and so on.

The solution isn't a return to the previous name of Scottish Unionist because it is in this peculiar history lies one of their big problems. The 'Unionist' part of the Conservatives full name has nothing to do with the union between Scotland and England. It originated from - Liberals take note - the absorption of the Liberal Unionist faction that split and joined the Tories over Gladstone's Home Rule policy.

In Scotland, the Conservatives traditionally got the Orange vote while Catholics voted overwhelmingly for Labour. One of the reasons for the long term secular decline of the Conservatives in Scotland is that this issue simply is no longer important to Scots, regardless of their confesional disposition - party because it is no longer partisan in the way it was when Labour favoured a 'united Ireland by consent' and partly because religion in general is a greatly diminished force in Scotland's social and political life.

The fate of the Conservatives has been as a result quite interesting: they are a more genuinely conservative party in Scotland than in the rest of the UK in that they are more firmly identified with the past. This is why they have been left behind. Any hope of their revival lies in recognising this fact. I for one hope they maintain their refusal to see this reality.

Money and liberty

We're used to money - or the love of it - being understood as the root of all evil or people being degraded by the 'cash nexus' and all that but there's another more liberating side to the invention of money.

Under feudalism, payment in kind was a mechanism for control as it limited the peasant farmer's production to certain activities. The growing acceptance of money allowed for a wider range of productive activity: they showed less interest in how the farmer raised the money provided they received their rent.

This is not to suggest that it fundamentally altered the power relationship based on ownership - only that within this structure the use of money, because it is universally accepted in exchange for goods and services, is relatively liberating.

During the industrial revolution this was well understood by mine-owners, which is why it was common for them during the early days of deep-cast mining to pay their workers in tokens that could only be spent in one shop. The shop they happened to own, of course.

This is how the latest suggestion that dole recipients should be given food vouchers should be understood. The obvious solution to poverty, which is simply to give the poor more money, is unacceptable to our new 'progressive' coalition overlords. They understand that money gives people choices and in the case of the poor, this would never do because they would just make the 'wrong' choices. All the talk of the need for economy, that deficits have to be cut, that we have to be 'realistic', should be understood against this background of selective libertarianism. We have today a government already showing the hardest face towards the poor in living memory. It takes a special kind of brassneck to describe this as 'new politics'.

Thinking about Christopher

Sad news that Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer. As Ophelia Benson remarks, the vultures have indeed started to circle. Cristina Odone announces that she is going to pray for him. Actually, while this intention is in the title of her post, she seems a little ambivalent:

"I would like to get on my knees and say the “Our Father” for someone for whom I have a sneaking admiration. But is it right to pray for someone who claims to find prayer hateful?"

Cristina - not sure if I'm really the kind of person you would appreciate advice from but understand this: Jesus said you've already received your reward in full. Since you claim to take him as something of an authority, perhaps this might help you make up your mind?

Filed under: whitewashed sepulchres

On the future of the Liberal Democrats

Alex Massie has a couple of sharp observations about the junior member of our coalition government:

"Labour continue to suffer from the category error of believing that liberals are really Labour voters who don't quite realise this. But this is not the case and it's quite evident that Nick Clegg is no Charles Kennedy. Indeed, the Lib Dem leadership might be thought closer to Germany's Free Democrats or their own ancestors in the Manchester Free Trade movement than to the SDP. When Nick Clegg said "I am not a Social Democrat" (or words to that effect) it might have been wise to listen to him."

He's right - but it's an easy mistake to make for a couple of reasons. Scots like Massie and myself have long been familiar with the way in which the Liberals can serve as a repository for non-Tory rightwing votes simply because this is more likely to be the case in Scotland than in England. Also, it is perhaps an easy mistake to make when you have 'first-to-the-microphone' Liberals like Simon Hughes getting more than their fair share of media attention. Here's his latest principled stand. (Liberals of his ilk always stand.)

"Hughes issued a blunt warning to the Tories that the government would break up if key pensioner benefits in the coalition agreement were cut. He launched the most significant intervention since the formation of the coalition in the debate that followed George Osborne's emergency budget on Tuesday when the chancellor of the exchequer said that welfare would bear the brunt of cuts."

It is indeed possible that the coalition might break up - but it is surely more likely that, with less dramatic consequences, the Liberals will break up? This Times editorial (free subscription) reminds us of the historical trend:

"The historical precedents suggest a sorry end for the Liberal Democrats. On three occasions, the Liberals and the Conservatives have formed a coalition in government and on three occasions the pact has divided the Liberals.

At the end of the 18th century, the Duke of Portland took half the Whigs into the Government of William Pitt the Younger. The “Portlandites” soon lost their independent status. In 1834 a small group of rebels, under Lord Stanley, joined the Tory Government of Robert Peel, only to find itself swallowed up by the bigger party. Stanley himself went on to become a three-time Tory Prime Minister.

In 1886 a large contingent of Liberals, led by Joseph Chamberlain, resigned in protest at Gladstone’s policy on Home Rule for Ireland. They joined governments led by Salisbury and Balfour but, in time, no trace was left of their entry."

Regarding this last example, the Conservatives are called the Conservative and Unionist Party for a reason. This tradition is older than the one that Ed Miliband referred to when he said,

"It takes a long time to establish an honourable political tradition. But it takes a very short time to destroy it. Are [Lib Dems] still the party of Keynes, Beveridge and Lloyd George? We all know these three men would turn in their graves at the idea that the inheritors of the Liberal tradition were supporting this budget."

Furthermore, it was a tradition established in a time when only the Liberals could be the repository of radical, labourist, anti-Tory political impulses, being as it was prior to the foundation to the Labour party. I would have thought, therefore, that the historical pattern was more, rather than less, likely to repeat itself - the ghosts of Keynes, Beveridge and Lloyd-George notwithstanding. The Times editorial that I linked above has both a more positive assessment of the Liberals' participation in coalition than I have, as well as being more optimistic about their likely fate:

"It is still possible that Mr Clegg might escape the fate of the many Whigs before him who have been strangled by the embrace of the Tories.*"

With this I'm reminded of a question that a distinguished theology lecturer I had at university was always inviting us to ask ourselves: "It's possible - but is it probable?" Let's see: measured in electoral terms the least successful party in postwar Britain is going into coalition with Britain's - actually Western Europe's - most successful election-winning machine. But if they can persuade people that they've delivered on a whole lot of constitutional issues that are somewhere between number thirty-seven and 'don't give a flying fuck' on the average person's list of priorities there's still a chance that the electorate will warm to them and they might come out on top? Well, it's possible...

*Thought I'd keep the cheap-shots for the footnotes. The editorial starts out well by including a bit of history - then it spoils it with this nonsense. Can't predict the future of the Times and its paywall experiment but I have to wonder who is going to pay for this shit when you can get speculation from proper historians elsewhere on the web for free?