Damn you Liam Fox.  I know your surname is not your fault, but surely you could have had the decency to do an IDS and insert a user friendly middle name as pun-proof collateral.  Since your surname is stripped down to the bare bones, it is nigh impossible to write about you without finding yourself in a pun  or innuendo minefield. For Fox sake? Fox in a hole?  All impossible for the discerning writer with standards.

Nor does it help that your unpaid adviser, Mr Werrity, has a name that appears to have come straight from a Trollope novel. I keep expecting to hear that Mr Bonteen, MP, is outraged by these developments.

That’s what it comes to, being ruled by Tories. Always the same.

I find it hard to take Liam Fox seriously at his best, and he is certainly not at his best at the moment. So perhaps I am not treating the allegations against him with the import they deserve.

Also, if I’m frank, I’m so keen to avoind the slur of innuendo that I find myself being restrained, not by political correctness, but by a desire to be well mannered. If I were to describe Mr Fox as a prating coxcomb, which I’d do in a heartbeat for most politicians,  it wouldn’t feel quite right. There’s something ugly in the way a lingering emphasis  on the word “friend” hovers over much of the copy generated on this topic. (more…)

Hello again. It’s been a while.

I paused this blog in mid-March, just as the Libyan conflict was beginning. My last post, in fact, was a full-throated endorsement of the government’s strategy in Libya. In a way, it felt appropriate to sign off with something definitively non-partisan, from someone who  is more than usually tribal. It is good to discover that evens have not conspired to make a mockery of that endorsement. (though of course, this could yet change).

Mind you, I have not been entirely absent from the Internet in the six months since I shuttered this blog.

So, just in order to have them collected together, here are some of the things I’ve written since then, in all sorts of places

A review of Steve Richards’ “Whatever it takes”: in Renewal

On a similar topic, but more lightheartedly, I had a comments thread debate with Neal Lawson here.

Johann Hari and the article for Speigel: in Liberal Conspiracy. I wanted to explain why I, as a progressive, felt strongly that Johann Hari’s failures as a journalist were worth highlighting. I don’t take any pleasure in saying his, but his repeated slip-shod writing, distortions, and ventures into smearing and fabrication disqualify him from being considered a worthy or serious journalist. More pleasingly, I’ve developed a solid respect to the people at the Orwell Prize, who took the allegations seriously.

We need to talk about Gordon: A discussion of the failures of a Prime Minister I supported. The long version for Renewal and a shorter, more Conference focused version in the Independent. This was the first time I have ever written for a National Newspaper, and it was rather a revelation to be edited professionally, perhaps especially in light of the above. Thanks to Ben Jackson at Renewal and Katherine Butler at the Independent, who not only improved my argument, but ensured I have now written articles not strewn with errors, both logical and syntactical.

A short series reflecting on Labour’s 2011 conference, on Labourlist: here, here and here. Notably downbeat, but still, an honest reflection of my current state of mind about the party I love.  If I were to write again, I’d try o be more positive about the future opportunities, but more trenchant about the past and constructive about the present. Hopefully that sentiment will carry over to this blog.

As to why I’ve started up again, it’s simple really. Six months ago, I knew what I wanted to say, but as a Labour loyalist didn’t really know quite how to say it constructively and helpfully.

Today I know the flaws and mistakes in what I think are still there, but feel I know enough to be sure that if I am wrong, or irritating, I can at lest be wrong and irritating in a way that is constructive, loyal and honest. The missing ingredient there, is of course, being interesting. If , then, well, I need to keep working at it!

So anyway, welcome to the Blog. My name’s Hopi Sen and I’m a Labour Loyalist and a fiscal conservative.

Let’s see how it goes, eh?

Hurrah for the end of conference season. It’s not been the most impressive, or most motivating Conference season for any of the three main parties. For each, Conference was a chance to wrap themselves in a comfort blanket of re-assurance, a brief occlusion from scepticism and doubt, a place where secret fears could be ignored, at least for a little while.

For the Lib Dems, there was the cheering belief that the Public would soon come to recognise the great self sacrifice they had made in forming a government that ran counter to what they had stood for when asking for support.

That there seemed to be little or no evidence to support this belief failed to prevent it being presented as a near-inevitable development.

The Lib Dems seemed to hold fast to the belief that their reward would surely come in the electoral hereafter, even though the voters who they need to attract show almost no sign at all of being impressed by the comeback narrative they crafted.

There is an electoral strategy available for the Lib Dems to attract new support. But it involves confirming and passionately advocating their real position as Britain’s second centre-right party and attracting the voters that David Cameron’s suprising irresolution prevents him from sweeping up. I doubt that this would be attractive to a majority of their party.

For Labour, there were two comforting delusions. The first was that the British people would soon surely recognise that we had been right all along on the economy and come to trust us again with its handling, just so long as we kept repeating that this was the case. The second, which emerged mostly after the conference, was that asserting general platitudes and moral verities as somehow especially Labour values was “setting the political agenda” rather than issuing banalities that almost anyone could assent to (and promptly did).

Perhaps even more significantly, Labour decided that it would be best to downplay what we would do if elected (Reduce Deficit, Pay down debt, Not Put up Taxes) in favour of stressing again the great things we would have done if we had not been wholly rejected at the last election, while emphasising the, bold, dashing (and vague) change we would offer in the future.

For the Conservatives, and for my money worst of all, there was a retreat from the reality of what they were doing, in favour of the assertion of what they want to be thought of as doing.

The Prime Minister and Chancellor told us that they want growth now, when in fact they seek a purging. They asserted optimism, and enthusiasm, and energy, as if the act of saying these things made them a policy.

It would, I felt, have been better if the Conservatives had embraced the misery and gloom of the economy. If they had said “Yes, we are hurting you. Yes, we are turning down the easy path to growth. We are doing this because we believe it will work, not this year, not even next, but if five, or ten, or twenty years. You may resent us now. We know many do and we understand. We may not win the next election. But we hope to have done a great service by the time you next decide on us.”

At least this would have had the benefit of being true to their governing strategy, if not optimistic, energetic and diffused with sunlight.

All three parties felt like they chose to hide from the realities of their electoral or governing predicaments this month. I don’t like the idea of a “disconnect” between politicians and the country, because politicians are always and everywhere disconnected from the country, and this is not a huge problem. This time, however, I expect that many will look at all three Parties, and wonder if this is the extent of their economic and political response to the various crises facing Britain.

This was a season of platitudes and rhetorical banalities. I fear that perhaps this was because the answers for all the parties are dark and difficult and in their own ways, unpopular.

We live in hard times. Perhaps we should address that, not hide from them among our own certainties and securities?

If you’ve found yourself here, this is because either

a) I told you to come and take a look

or

b) You’re a really enthusiatic googler of me.

Either way, let me know what you think of the new digs.

Also, as a test, here’s an embedded clip from the beeb

Ahh. The perils of being a junior minister

Just wanted to say that there will soon be more blogging action here.

I want to redesign and self host the site, and migrate it to my own url, so will be a little while yet. But since the site is still getting a couple of hundred visits a day, thought I should mention the place isn’t dead, merely awaiting resuscitation.

I’m thinking of making it the first group blog by a single author.

After what feels like an age of indecision, yet is in fact less than a month, the UN resolution on Libya feels like a moment of hope. That hope is qualified, uncertain and unsure, of course, but real.

Like many more qualified, I worry that the progress that Gadaffi has made in the last fortnight has been enough to secure his regime, and isolate the rebellion. the UN resolution allows the protection of civilians, but that task will be hard to enforce from the air alone, especially in areas under the control of the regime. The knock at the door, the midnight kidnappings, torture and death squads will continue. The regime must surely fall, but it may yet hurt many as it collapses.

For the moment, it looks like Benghazi is safe, but many other parts of Libya are now under the control of a vindictive, oppressive regime. Thank God that at least the Libyan government no longer have the means to deploy chemical weapons, so the fate of Halabja and Marsh Arabs will be avoided. As the New York Times said

“Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important”

That said, however uncertain the future, or dangerous for those behind Libyan lines, this is still a moment of hope. The United Nations has set out clear language, with little of the complexity of the resolutions that so hampered the UN in Bosnia. Although this is only a beginning, and there are many horrors to avoid, this is the right thing to do.

So a word of praise for the Prime Minister. In his own government he was perhaps the clearest, earliest voice for a no fly zone. He has firmly cast aside his early rhetoric about the purpose of British foreign policy. A choice has been made, and it is the right one.

The consequences of that choice, which surely requires the protection of civilians in the West as well as the East and the manner of the eventual ending of the Libyan regime, may throw up many more challenges. The road ahead will be tough, and there will be challenges to our resolve both in Libya and far beyond. But the right road has been chosen. The Prime Minister deserves support and congratulation for that decision, both now and when far harder times come.

Through a turmoil of seething jealously, I am summoning up the grace to congratulate Mr Iain Martin on his new job as a political columnist for the Daily Mail.

I might not have much time for the Mail’s politics, or indeed Mr Martin’s, but he is an excellent, witty, independent-minded writer, and the Mail will serve as a bully pulpit for him. Congratulations are deserved on such a promotion.

When he was at the WSJ Europe, Iain was one of the right wing writers I made a point to read, along with the likes of Alex Massie, Neil O’Brien and, Mr Finkelstein, naturally.

Anyway, his promotion is a good on for both Mail and Martin. Now if there is a popular mid market left of centre newspaper that wishes to employ me as a weekly columnist, I am willing to discuss terms.

What’s that you say? No such (Daily) Beast? How can this be?

*Oh, and a Mr Toby Young, who I think we can agree is one of the finest Conservative minds of his, or any other, generation. I’m sure John Stuart Mill would agree wholeheartedly.

On Saturday I went to the Progress political weekend. It was very nice. Jim Murphy spoke, and so did Liam Byrne, and Caroline Flint, and Douglas Alexander. Andrew Adonis also spoke. He was very nice and told us all about Birmingham. I have written a couple of posts about it on Labourlist. One was meant to be funny. The other one was serious. For some reason it felt a good idea to write this post in a “What I did on my Summer Holidays” style. I suspect this was a mistake.

(I want to come back to Douglas Alexander’s speech a bit more later on, because it was very good)

A letter has appeared in today’s Times opposing the Alternative Vote. This missive has been penned, or endorsed, by several prominent historians.

As you may know, I am a very mild supporter of AV. Still, this letter has given me the RAGE(tm).

Here’s the essential paragraphs (full text here for those beyond the pay-wall):

“The referendum on May 5 that threatens to introduce a system of “Alternative Voting” — a voting system that will allow MPs to be elected to Parliament even if they do not win the majority of constituents’ first preference votes — also threatens to break this principle.

For the first time since 1928 and the granting of universal suffrage, we face the possibility that one person’s casting ballot will be given greater weight than another. For the first time in centuries, we face the unfair idea that one citizen’s vote might be worth six times that of another. It will be a tragic consequence if those votes belong to supporters of extremist and non-serious parties.”

Let us avert our eyes from the unfortunate confusion between “majority” and “plurality” in the first paragraph. Understanding the difference requires only the most cursory understanding of mathematics, but as a History graduate, I can confirm that this is not regarded as an essential skill for burgeoning historians, except for those boring ones who study trade, or agricultural production or some other tedious byway.

Nor am I irritated by the idea that AV might make one vote worth “six times” that of another. This is mere boilerplate propaganda, and such simplistic piffle is as attractive to historians as the rest of us

No, what enrages me is that these prominent historians don’t seem to know their British political history. Since they are some of our most well known proponents of history, could they not be bothered to even check the facts?

They claim that “For the first time since 1928 and the granting of universal suffrage, we face the possibility that one person’s casting ballot will be given greater weight than another”. This is simply not true.

Until the end of the 1945-50 parliament, several seats in the House of Commons were reserved for the English Universities. Any graduate from these universities could vote in the election for these seats, in addition to their vote in the residential constituency. So the vote of University Graduates counted for more than that of non-graduates.

Further, from 1918 the elections for those seats were conducted by Single Transferable Vote. So Britain had both an unequal franchise, and a system of proportional representation in the House of Commons well after the introduction of universal suffrage. Indeed, the system was something of a controversy at the time, as the Liberal candidate in the two-seat constituency of Oxford University, Prof Gilbert Murray was regularly in second place in first preferences, but was repeatedly beaten by Conservative candidates in the 1920′s, because the surplus of the leading Conservative candidate (Hugh Cecil) was redistributed to the second Conservative candidate (Sir Charles Oman).

It is rather sad that such ignorance of the history of British election systems has been so publicly displayed by some of Britain’s leading historians.

Someone whose own personal history of pension planning is dreadful should not opine on pensions oermuch.

So I won’t.

Compulsory enrollment (or even an opt out system) in pensions twenty years ago would have done me the world of good, I suspect.

So I understand why public sector workers are keen to protect their pensions, and why others have little sympathy with their fears. At the risk of sounding wet and weedy, I’m going to let those who know whereof they speak lead on this one.

(Oh, and on a positive note, the export data for January was really good*. We may be getting a manufacturing led exports boom. That’s great, and much to be hailed. Only problems? Manufacturing’s share of UK economy is not that great, retail figures are poor and business investment is still low. Still, the good news is we’ve got a window of sterling driven competitiveness and high export profits. We need to use that short term advantage and turn it into something sustainable.)

*only one month figures blah blah blah choppy recovery blah blah still, signs of a trend blah blah.