Land of hope is Tory. Duh.

He may not move the voters, but Ed Miliband has certainly rattled David Cameron's cage. The PM name checked Labour no fewer than 25 times in his address to the Tory conference yesterday in Manchester. He mentioned Ukip not once and only referred to the Liberal Democrats as an albatross around the Tory neck. So, why has Ed got under Tory skins?

Well, obviously Milband's taking on the energy companies has annoyed the Tories because it is rather popular, as was a fair amount of Labour's new "red" agenda. Hitting property developers and energy monopolies and shifting taxation from small businesses to big ones is hardly striking at the roots of capitalism. This is the kind of policy agenda that some Conservatives used to rather favour - supporting the little man, the small business against powerful vested interests.

One Nation conservatism of the type Harold MacMillan largely invented and Michael Heseltine still advocates today was all about raising the living standards of the many and curbing the privileges of the few. It was about building houses, promoting welfare and extending economic activity to the 'regions'. It wasn't about rejecting Europe, victimising the unemployed and pandering to the prejudices of voters in the South East of England.

You only needed to look at the huge blue banners draped around the conference centre in Manchester to get the message: "Immigration Down. Crime Down. Welfare Down. Taxes Down". Mrs Thatcher would have been proud to discover that her legacy was so secure in the age of "liberal" Conservatism. Behind the emolient face of David Cameron, the Conservatives have defaulted to their true blue roots. This is a party tacking rapidly to the right.

David Cameron, we are told, is now planning to cut housing and possibly other benefits from unemployed people under the age of 25. This is a draconian extension of the welfare cap that has proved so successful for the Conservatives. He has committed his party to an in/out referendum on membership of Europe, a "go home" policy on immigration and a form of hair shirt fiscal conservatism by promising extending public sector cuts to 2020 in order to replace the deficit with a budget surplus. If he is serious, this would involve truly heroic spending reductions, since the Coalition has already failed in its original 2010 pledge to eliminate the deficit by 2015.

Kim's nukes to target Glasgow - Cameron

David Cameron raised the stakes in the independence debate last week by insisting that it would be “foolish” to abandon Trident in the Clyde when there is a growing threat from countries like North Korea. I'm not sure it was entirely wise to suggest that we might be on Kim's target list. Are we to assume our Trident missiles are now potentially targeting Pyongyang?

Residents of Scotland's largest conurbation might wonder if having weapons of mass destruction, which are illegal under international law, on our doorstep is a good idea if they are liable to attract the attentions of rogue nuclear states. Even the former Tory Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, said Cameron's intervention was “absurd”. But the PM seems to believe that Trident is a key plank in the “positive” case for the union. A majority of Scots seem to disagree, according to opinion polls, and think that there are better things to spend £100bn on than a useless virility symbol.

David Cameron also believes that the Coalitions's welfare reforms, that kick in this week, will bolster the Union by targeting scroungers and skivers who set fire to their children. But Scots do not seem over keen on weapons of social mass destruction like the bedroom tax, which is shaping up to be the poll tax of the 21^st Century.

Aliens in warning against independence. SNP needs to lead constitution debate, not follow it.

    Things fall apart. The SNP has got the right question, but it isn't getting the right answers.   The Nationalists have been on the defensive for the last six months over relatively obscure procedural issues about relations with Europe, currency union and the mechanics of transition to independence.  The Yes for Scotland campaign has failed to make a significant impact.   The momentum from the 2011 election landslide has largely spent and the Nationalists are turning into their old embattled and defensive selves.   They need to think carefully now about how to combat all this and get off the back foot. 

   The problem is partly the sheer weight of the forces against them.  Better Together have the UK Government, the three unionist parties in Westminster and Scotland, the UK Treasury and civil service and the Scottish and UK press on their side, plus fellow travellers like Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission. The Nationalists have Alex Salmond and a few loose cannons. 

       On the morning when the Scottish government's fiscal commission reported that monetary union was a perfectly sensible option, a leading Scottish daily's front page read:  "Legal experts in warning on independence".  The press coverage of the referendum has been reduced to a kind of pro forma  "..........in warning on independence" (subs to fill).    This kind of thing infuriates the SNP who insist, rightly, that you can find legal experts who will say practically anything. They don't understand why the Scottish press is so hostile to independence.  But the fact is that they are.

    The SNP can't change the weather, so they will have to find ways to stop getting soaked. They have to stop being on the defensive.   They need to be realistic about the climate of opinion among Scottish voters, and the difficulty of persuading a country that lacks confidence in itself to go it alone. That means working back to where the voters actually are, rather than where the SNP would want them to be.  I means going back to the multi-option referendum Scottish voters sought but are being denied.  The SNP needs to recreate, and lead the home rule coalition,just as Alex Salmond originally wanted. 

   This isn't going to be won by a brilliant campaign as in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections where the SNP came from ten points behind Labour to winning a landslide.  A referendum is very different from a general election. It is for keeps - and that is scary.

  The unionists press can always be relied upon to pour cold water on any suggestion that the Scots are capable of managing their own affairs.  The howls of derision that greeted the Scottish government's document on the transition to independence, were entirely predictable too. And the criticism was not without some justification, since it did rather look as if Alex was going to create the universe in six days.

The truth is that a the Nationalists themselves have only recently begun to think in practical terms about things like negotiating a constitution and are uncomfortable with the mechanics of instant nation building. The SNP has been a brilliant vote-winning machine, but it has never been anywhere near winning independence, and under Alex Salmond it has always pursued a gradualist, incremental approach to self-government, rather than a big bang. And any way you look at it, independence is a leap of faith. They need to bridge the Scottish confidence gap, the psychology of national defeatism.

David Cameron's speech on Europe. What he will say and why he is wrong.

David Cameron's speech on Europe is turning into the greatest speech never made. Fortunately, from leaks and briefings we know a lot of what's in it.  Cameron says that he wants to address the "three crises" of Europe: the eurozone debt crisis, the democratic deficit and the loss of European competitiveness.

Taking these in reverse order, the competitiveness issue is probably the most dubious. Is Germany uncompetitive? The Single Market is all about competition. What the prime minister means is that all the social protections of Europe - the working time directive, the social chapter - have placed a "burden" on business that makes Europe uncompetitive with China and South East Asia. But this is pretty dubious also. Europe isn't "uncompetitive" because of social legislation but because Europeans have higher incomes than workers who have just left the paddy fields for the factories of Shnezhen and Guangdong. I trust the PM does not want British wages to be cut to a pound an hour, though I sometimes wonder.

The democratic deficit in Europe is all too real because the EU is very bureaucratic. The European Parliament has very little power, and the big decisions in Europe are taken by the Council of Ministers, on which member states have a veto on many issues. But is Mr Cameron proposing to make the European Parliament a truly democratic institution with legislative powers and the right to elect a government of Europe? Of course not - that would mean a United States of Europe, to which he is resolutely opposed. The PM wants less democracy in Europe not more. He wants powers repatriated to Britain.

Which brings us to the eurozone debt crisis. Now, this is clearly a serious problem, despite the recent calm on the European sovereign debt markets. The action taken by the European Central Bank in buying up the bonds of troubled states like Spain and Greece has been successful, for now, in containing the debt spiral. But the fundamental problem remains: that the single currency needs financial integration at European level. It needs a central European treasury, with the power to issue bonds for the whole of the eurozone backed by the whole of the eurozone, and the power to intervene in member states' financial systems. David Cameron agrees with this, and has called on Europe to "get on with it", But he doesn't want to be part of fiscal union because this too would be a United States of Europe. He even tried to veto the enlargement of the EU bailout fund in December 2011. There is no way the Coalition is going to allow UK taxes and borrowing to be regulated by the European Central Bank, still less have the contents of the UK Chancellor's Budget revealed to the EU before it is presented to parliament.

Forget Barroso, what if the David Cameron takes Scotland out of Europe.

 Sunday Herald 16/12/12

I don't know about Tantric sex, but the Prime Minister is certainly a teaser. Last week he informed hungry hacks at a Westminster press lunch that he had delayed yet again his long forecast speech on a referendum on European membership. He said that like Tantric sex, it would be worth the wait, though I'm not quite sure for whom. Perhaps he is suggesting that the opposition, or the EU, will be shafted. Or could it be Scotland?

Scottish debate on Europe has been depressingly parochial. For weeks, commentators and unionist politicians have been blasting the SNP for not being able to guarantee that Scotland would gain automatic entry to the European Union after independence. What the myopic chatterati have failed to grasp is that the UK is moving rapidly away from the EU and, under the present constitutional arrangements, is likely to take Scotland with it – at least if the majority of Tory MPs in Westminster get their way.

Conservative opinion on Europe has changed out of all recognition in the past 20 years, since the Tory Prime Minister, John Major, faced down his rebels and ratified the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union. That was when it was still possible for a Tory PM to say that they wanted Britain to be “at the heart of Europe”. Not any more they don't. They are all eurosceptics now. It is extremely rare to hear anyone in the Conservative Party having a good word for Brussels, which is now universally condemned as a parasitical bureaucracy presiding over a basket case currency that will shortly collapse.

David Cameron is a pragmatist, and doesn't want to cut economic ties with Europe, but he is under increasing pressure and not just from his parliamentary party. The UK Independence Party is snapping at Tory heels in southern constituencies, and the UK press, led by the Daily Mail and the Sun, with their five million readers, are increasingly europhobic. According to YouGov, a clear majority of English voters say they either want to leave the EU or renegotiate the terms of British entry. The Labour leader Ed Miliband has turned trappist on Europe, because he doesn't want to be on the wrong side of public opinion, and is likely to back a referendum on Europe after the next general election. The Liberal Democrats have also called for a referendum on British membership.

Cameron, when he finally gets over his coitus interruptus, is expected to say this: Britain will make a series of proposals for renegotiation to Brussels along the lines of “back to the Common Market”. In other words, Britain would explicitly be opting out of the European Union, and rejecting its right to legislate on UK internal affairs. This will be a momentous step. It will almost certainly be rejected by the European Union because there is actually no Common Market left to join. Britain would have to opt out of the EU altogether and seek status such as Norway, which is part of he European Economic Area.

Tory Muff and Jeff routine. Caring Cameron feels their pain.

The Tories under David Cameron have become the masters of the conference Mutt and Jeff routine. All week ministerial Muttleys put the boot into big families on welfare, batter burglars, threaten referendums on Europe, kick the Liberal Democrats in the goolies by rejecting their wealth tax. This all goes down well; red meat for the conference carnivores.

Then on the last day, along comes Jeff, in the form of compassionate Dave, who is kind to animals and gays, and is talks movingly,  about his late legless Dad and by implication all disadvantaged souls. Oozing empathy. Patron of the Paralympic games. And it has to be said that David Cameron does it very well. This was a hard-headed Thatcherite speech straight from the 1980s but delivered in a 'caring' way. He really does sound like he believes in the NHS. He teared up when talking about his late son Ivan.  Not many politicians can introduce real emotion into such a stage-managed event as a leader's address without it sounding cynical.

And technically this was a much better speech than last week's modern studies lecture from Ed Miliband. Cameron can hit all the notes - poking fun at Ed's attempt to don the mantle of “one nation” Conservatism. “Labour: the party of one notion: more borrowing”. He got his lists right: “We remember who spent our golden legacy, who sold our gold, who busted our banks, who smothered our businesses, who wracked up our debts, wrecked our economy, ruined our reputation and risked our future”. (It was Labour in case you were wondering).

Mostly, the speech - like that passage - said nothing at all, but Cameron said it with real passion. He even managed to get the Tory gathering to applaud foreign aid which he said had paid for the vaccination of 130,000 children since Sunday alone. “You, the Conservative Party helped do that”, he said, daring them not to clap, “and you should be proud of what you've done.” He avoided all the difficult issues - gay marriage, the referendum on Europe, the challenge from Boris, “the zinger on the zipwire”. And he didn't mention his Coalition partners once. But he did mention Alex Salmond and Abu Hamza, who were name-checked as if they were public enemies one and two. He promised to win the Scottish independence referendum and expel radical Muslim clerics.

This was billed as a blood sweat and tears speech, and he didn't try do disguise the seriousness of the situation five years into the Great Recession.  He told us that Britain was living on borrowed time as a great commercial nation. That all those enterprising upstart countries, who were recipients of aid money only the day before yesterday, are now battering at the gates. He condemned the old world countries as “fat, sclerotic, over-regulated, spending money on unaffordable welfare systems, huge pension bills, unreformed public services”. Did he mean us?

Well this is the problem, because in the same breath as condemning sclerotic, “old world” countries like ours, he couldn't resist suggesting that Britain was also booming under the Conservatives. A million new private sector jobs have been created in the last 2 years, he said. Though he didn't say how many of these were full time. The PM said that the rate of new business start ups in Britain was faster than ever before in history, though he didn't say how many of these small businesses are those part timers opting to become self-employed for tax reasons. We make more cars than in the 70s, he said, though the firms are foreign owned. and we are “number one in the world for offshore wind”. Somehow these sunny uplands didn't quite hang together.

Of course, all politicians try to have it both ways – it's what they do. But there is more than a danger that this will backfire on Cameron. He knows that the economic policy isn't working; and we know that the economic policy isn't working. And he knows that we know. Take borrowing. It's going up under the Tories as fast as under Labour, in large part because of the failure of growth policies. Those millions of new business start ups aren't delivering real jobs. They are delivering frothy, here-today-gone-tomorrow jobs at the disposable end of the labour market. These aren't the kind of businesses that are going to take on the Chinese or the South Koreans. And they aren't the kind of jobs that are going to restore Britain as a great manufacturing nation.

Austerity isn't enough. This isn't the 1980s. Governments can't just curb employment rights, cut taxes and public spending and expect business to do the rest – unless you want a poundland Britain sinking into post-industrial mediocrity. 21^st Century governments are condemned to be interventionist – just as they have been in those upstart nations. Does anyone seriously believe that the Chinese state banks sit back and leave it all to the market?  Is that how they built 25,000kms of motorway, an entire high speed rail network and the five longest bridges in the world all in the last four years?

I'm not suggesting we concrete over Britain, but growth doesn't happen by itself any more. If we are to exploit Britain's – Scotland's – renewable energy potential, government needs to get behind green energy. And someone needs to tell the Chancellor, George Osborne, who seems more interested in backing shale gas and nuclear power stations that are too expensive to build.   The Conservatives need to realise that Europe isn't going to go away, and that the EU remains the destination for half of Britain's exports. The abortive EADS/BAE Systems defence deal shows that you can't do business at this level without government being heavily involvedl. 

    Margaret Thatcher's vision of a Britain of self-employed Essex tradesmen, owning their homes and getting ahead, is as much a part of folk history as the Winter of Discontent and union barons. Truth is, most of them are in negative equity and struggling to afford their next white van. Cameron commiserated with 33 year old “strivers” who can't afford their first house house, but he insisted that the Tories were still the party of the aspirant middle class - the “Aspiration Nation” as he put it, in a sound-bite that sounded like it came from “The Thick Of It”.  Cameron risks being a prisoner of the past, a Little Britain Thatcherite who is a clever speaker, but without a lot to say.   

Lost in London during Boris's games.

   Driving back from Dover from holiday, we decided to let the satnav do the job of getting us round London. Yes, I know – you just head north on the M25, but we'd heard it was jammed because of the Olympics. Anyway, the satnav lady, in her digital wisdom, decided to take us straight into central London on the A2 and, before we knew it, we were in the middle of the Olympic Games complex and panicking in case we never got out again. But we did. In fact, we sailed through central London with uncanny speed because there was practically nothing on the roads. I have never seen London so quiet. It was like the sequel to 28 Days.

What has this got to do with the political prospects of Boris Johnson, who added to his buffoonish reputation yesterday by being left dangling from a zip wire during a photo-opportunity in London's Victoria park? Well, the success of London's traffic management during the Games is being seen as both another feather in the cap of the London Mayor and another nail in the coffin of David Cameron. The lack ot traffic congestion in central London, though an administrative achievement, is apparently helping to plunge Britain into what is being called a “triple dip recession”, presumably because economic activity has been damaged by people staying at home and watching British athletes failing to win anything. And Cameron will get the blame. 

Riding for a fall with the Murdoch hunt.

Why do they do it? Why do political leaders, even in Scotland, worship at the tawdry court of the Sun king Rupert Murdoch? What to they think they'll gain? Murdoch is the most toxic brand in British public life, his crude right wing publications a byword for bent news and illegal practices like phone hacking. Yet there he was, the “Dirty Digger” as Private Eye calls the boss of News International,  sneaking into Bute House by the back door on Wednesday for tete a tete with Alex Salmond. Even as the claims of a “network of police corruption” by the Sun,were still reverberating across the Leveson inquiry. And on the very day that James Murdoch resigned in disgrace from his post as chairman of NI. How many votes does Alex Salmond want to lose?

Of course the First Minister insists Murdoch was just there to talk about jobs over "tea and Tunnocks caramel wafers" as one of Scotland's leading employers. But if he thinks Scottish voters will believe that then he is out to lunch. Salmond also says that he made his views clear about Leveson and newspaper ethics. But this came rather hollow from a politician who had just leaked the date of the Scottish independence referendum - 18^th October – to give the super soaraway Sunday Sun a front page splash for its first edition. Is that really the kind of behaviour we expect from our First Minister?  That he sells his referendum for a sycophantic tweet from Rupert Murdoch? It's not even as if the Sunday Sun actually supported independence. It won't unless and until Murdoch becomes convinced that the referendum is a certainty. The Sun doesn't lead opinion - it follows it. Why don't politicians understand that.

The new Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, made a spirited attempt to embarrass Salmond at First Minister's Question time. But it rebounded badly, not least because of Labour's own record of cosying up to Rupert. Salmond read out the guest list for Murdoch's summer champagne party, which included Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. He might also have reminded Lamont about that summer sleepover party that Gordon Brown's wife Sarah organised for Rebecca Brooks when she was editor of the Sun - at the Labour Prime Minister's official residence at Chequers. Wonder if she brought her gift horse from the Met?

The Union's last thousand days.

At times of constitutional turmoil, like last week, I'm often approached by researchers and producers from the London media looking for someone to explain the will-they-won't-they, devo-max independence-well-maybe referendum. They invariably use the word ”wily” when they're talking about Alex Salmond, as if the First Minister was a petty demagogue in some post-colonial banana republic. Isn't he 'playing games with the constitution', 'deviously delaying the referendum', 'picking a fight with Westminster'? Well, last week his wiliness was to play with a straight bat.

David Cameron believes he 'got a result' in that he finally “smoked out” Salmond on the referendum date last week. But there was really never any secret about the timing of the referendum, since it had been made clear in the Scottish election that the ballot would be held in the second half of the parliament. And for all the talk of imposing an early referendum, that's exactly what is going to happen. Similarly, as civic Scotland luminaries like Canon Kenyan Wright have argued, it really isn't up to Cameron or Salmond to decide if there are three options or two, but the Scottish people. The SNP's preference has always been to have a single question, yes-or-no ballot on independence, and for all the fuss and fluster, that hasn't changed either.

If an early referendum had been imposed on Scotland, it would anyway have been disastrous for David Cameron, since the SNP would have boycotted it. Rather like the Northern Ireland referendum in 1973, or the Keep the Clause referendum in 2000, it would have had zero credibility as a result. So, why did the Prime Minister propose it at all? Worse – why raise the prospect of an early referendum on Sunday, and then appear to back down within 48 hours? He must have realised that by intervening in this way he risked raising Scottish hackles at a Tory 'toff' trying to 'fix' Scotland's future.

The Great Lib Con

  It’s called the Great Lib Con.   You voted for an end to foreign wars, nuclear power, Trident and for a more positive attitude to immigration and Europe.  You got a Tory government.  On Tuesday,  many liberal-left voters in Scotland were incoherent with rage when they discovered that they’d actually voted for David Cameron when they thought they were voting for Charles Kennedy.  How the F@@k did that happen?  I’ll never vote Liberal Democrat EVER again! were some of the more moderate comments on the new political order.  

  Now, as someone who urged tactical voting to change the electoral system, I suppose I have to take my share of the blame for this.  Before the election, a number of people asked me if there wasn’t a danger of “letting the Tories back in” if they lent their votes to the Libdems.  My reply was if we took that attitude, nothing would ever change.  We’d be left for ever  with a reactionary two-party duopoly in Westminster.

   

 Bumping up the Liberal Democrat vote, which  seemed to be building nicely during the campaign thanks to Nick Clegg’s TVcoup,  seemed the surest way of delivering a fatal blow to the corrupt and undemocratic Westminster system.  But tactical voting isn’t an exact science.  The Liberal surge faded fatefully on polling day, and that fatally weakened the third force.  Labour rejected a “coalition of losers” and the rest is history. 

   So, am I eating my words in the cold aftermath to the Great Lib Con?  Is it humble pie time for misguided, too-clever-by-half hack?  Perhaps - but I’m not alone: electoral reformers like Billy Bragg have also been seen with pastry crumbs on their chins.  Others, including journalists on the Guardian and Independent newspapers, have been eating hats and running naked down high streets.  No, I really didn’t expect that there would be a formal coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.  My forecast was that there would either be a Tory minority administration after a hung parliament, or a Liberal-Labour progressive alliance.  In the end - ha ha ha - we got the Nick and Dave show.  George Osborne in charge of the public finances.  Iain Duncan Smith in charge of welfare.   Liam Fox with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Five non returnable years of Conservative government. 

   It was a shock certainly.  If you think Tory government is the end of the world - and who knows it might come to that - then you’re probably right to think that we’ve all been lib-conned.   But the inconvenient truth is that the coalition deal, if you study it, is actually a rather good one.  It wasn’t just the five cabinet seats or the fifteen junior ministerial posts.  Or the referendum on AV, which isn’t actually proportional representation.  No, reading the document, I can understand why the Liberal Democrat negotiators were astonished when they saw what the Cameron Tories were offering them.  An elected House of Lords with PR, curbing the power of the executive in the Commons, repealing Labour’s anti-civil liberties legislation, reforming the banks, the £10,000 tax threshold, scrapping ID cards, tax powers for Holyrood, no third runway at Heathrow, etc.  Also, the Liberal Democrats negotiated opt out on clauses things like nuclear power, married couples allowance.  

  Yes, the penalty  is that the Libdems have to sit - metaphorically at least  - alongside the “nutters” as Nick Clegg described the Tories' far right partners in the European Parliament.  Libdems will have to accept a cap on immigration, the renewal of the Trident missile system, savage cuts in public spending, probably withdrawal of benefits from many lower income families.  There may be all manner of nasties lurking in the Tory in-tray that we don’t know about.

  But was there an alternative?   The Lib-Lab progressive realignment that we all talked about was a non-starter, and not just because Labour MPs like Tom Harris and Douglas Alexander refused to sup with the hated Nats. On Tuesday it became clear that there was not only a deep mistrust of the Liberal Democrats on the Labour benches, but a profound antipathy to thoroughgoing political reform. Senior Labour figures like John Reid and David Blunkett ensured that no deal would be struck by launching very public condemnation of the talks even as Labour and the Liberal Democrats were sitting in Number Ten trying to find common ground. This wasn’t isolated indiscipline either: the ex-ministers were clearly speaking for many on the Labour backbenches. 

   No guarantees on electoral reform or the rest of the reform agenda were forthcoming.  So, what were the Libdems to do?  Accept no deal from Labour or a great deal from the Cameron Conservatives? Difficult choice, I know - and one I’m glad I will never have to make.  The Tory offer was carefully calibrated to deliver genuine and far reaching reform in exchange for stable government - stable Conservative government. The Liberal Democrats may end up as human shields for Tory cuts, and they have a hell of a job justifying themselves in Scotland.  But here’s a thought: Alex Salmond only managed to secure power, and the first nationalist administration in history, by doing a deal with the Tories.  Sometimes, party leaders have to deal with the devil. 

  

  Last week reminded me a little of the 1992 general election when everyone expected the Tories to be wiped out in Scotland, and they returned with an extra two Scottish seats, as well as retaining control in Westminster.  There were howls of anguish and gloomy forecasts of the end of civilisation as we know it.  Five years later the Tories really were wiped out, such was the force of the Scottish tactical vote against them.   That led to an irreversible process of constitutional reform which led to Scotland regaining its parliament after 300 years.  

   I’m not saying that’s going to happen again. But what we can say is that the process of political and constitutional revolution that was begun in the Scottish Parliament has now moved south.  Westminster will be radically changed under this coalition. And so will Scotland,  because the Calman reforms and other constitutional changes, will take us much further down the road to federalism.   Of course, many suspect this Lib-Con deal was cooked up before the election by two public schoolboys seeking to edge Labour out of power for a generation. But if so, all you can say is that Labour fell for it hook, line and plonker. 

A Very Civil Partnership.

   It was like a crazy dream, a comic fantasy.  Nick and Dave hugging on the doorstep of Number Ten.  Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of the UK.  As the day wore on my fingers were numb from pinching myself.    There they stood among the foliage of the Downing St rose garden, joking away,  like Ant and Dec in a trailer for I’m a Liberal Democrat Get Me Out Of Here.  Except the Cleggies aren’t going to be allowed to get out of this game because they’ve agreed to a mandatory, five year, non-returnable term of office. And it’s no secret who’ll be eating the bugs in the bush-tucker trials.

   It was all wildly improbable, but Clegg and Cameron seemed to carry it off.  The nation’s press suspended disbelief just long enough to listen to their joint message about the new politics. About giving power back to the people, about going green, helping the disadvantaged and revoking all those nasty Labour offences against civil liberties like ID cards and snooping wheelie bins.    The Westminster hacks were puzzled, though, by the mechanics of coalition governance.  Who’ll control the spin-doctors? Who ‘ll control the civil service?  What happens when there’s a by-election and the two parties have to start fighting each other?  Who takes questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time?  If the phone calls at three am, who’ll answer it?

 Never has the Westminster village seemed so parochial. These issues of coalition protocol were mostly resolved ten years ago during the first Holyrood coalition. The new politics has just filtered south.  Coalition only looks strange because no one in Westminster looks beyond College Green.    The Libdems also work with Tories and others in big councils like Birmingham. One suspects that the Liberal Democrats played a blinder in the negotiations with the Tories largely because they’ve had long experience of doing coalition deals in Scotland. 

  

   And there’s no doubt that Nick and co did play a blinder in those five hectic, sweaty, adrenaline-soaked days following the general election.  It was a poor election result for the Libdems, who actually lost seats, but they still got an amazing result from the Conservatives:  five cabinet posts, the deputy prime ministership, a referendum on electoral reform, ten thousand pound tax threshold, banking reform, fixed term parliaments, an elected House of Lords,  freedom to abstain on nuclear issues and marriage tax breaks.  You wonder where the Tory manifesto went. Green investment bank, Tobin tax on financial transactions, pupil premium, more powers for Holyrood.  It was a real deal, which could  change  British politics for good.  Unfortunately, it came from the Tories. 

  This will almost certainly split the Liberal Democrats. When the Cleggies find themselves having to defend the deficit reduction programme and savage cuts to public spending to their party conference there will be blood.  Some Libdems think it’s not so much a coalition as a suicide pact, in which they have to shoot themselves first.  But knowing the risks, Nick Clegg still grabbed the Tory offer on Tuesday after he’d satisfied himself that Labour wasn’t serious about any “progressive alliance”.   Now,  Labour insist it was the Libdems, not they, who sold out the rainbow coalition; that the “personal chemistry” between Clegg and Cameron was down to the Liberal Democrat leader being a natural Tory who always wanted to do a deal with his public school chum.  Certainly, Nick Clegg had great difficulties relating to Gordon Brown, whom he regarded as a political neanderthal.  But it was Labour’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for a coalition that unsealed the deal even before the negotiations got underway.    The succession of senior Labour figures like John Reid, David Blunkett who went on TV saying that any “coalition of losers” would be undemocratic and unstable and would - shock horror - involve talking to nationalists and other political vermin.     It wasn’t the numbers that was the problem - all the parties were losers in this election.  No, it was visceral hatred of Alex Salmond all  Liberal Democrats that scuppered the great broad left realignment. Tribalism is alive and well in the Labour Party.

   Also, Labour had clearly lost the will to govern. Tired and emotional, the thought of going to all the effort of cobbling together a multinational coalition was just too much.   Never has a government seemed to happy to lose office.  Gordon Brown practically skipped out of Downing Street, wreathed in smiles, no doubt thinking about the booby traps he’s left concealed in the cabinet in-tray.  David Cameron, by contrast, almost stumbled into Number Ten, with no grand phrases or air of destiny.  Compared with Margaret Thatcher, with her quotes from St Thomas Aquinas, Cameron looked like an estate agent who’d come to look the property over and give a valuation once he’d inspected the loft. 

   As the furniture vans arrived to take away the football posters and books on post neoclassical endogenous growth theory,  Labour MPs looked forward to an easier life in opposition.   Honing their invective against the “Tories little helpers” and the “yellow Tories” .   Labour MPs believe that the Lib-Con alliance will crack in exactly fifty days, when the Tories’ emergency budget unveils the true horror of the cuts to be inflicted on the public sector - on local government, social services, non-front line health etc.. The very public sector that employs most Liberal Democrat voters. The public sector unions will be out on the streets within weeks and Labour will be joining them on the picket lines, fighting the Tory-Liberal cuts.   Cleggie! Cleggie! Cleggie! Out! Out! Out! 

    In Scotland, Labour are going back to their constituencies to prepare for government after the 2011 Scottish elections. All those ex-Labour Scottish Liberal Democrat voters  are horrified that they ended up with a Tory government and many will never vote Libdem again.  Alex Salmond’s enthusiastic advocacy of the “progressive coalition”  concealed just how  poor a result Thursday was for the nationalists who, far from winning 20 seats, emerged one with fewer than when the campaign began.    With Labour on the march in Scotland, the SNP will have to have to fight like hell to win re-election    But one thing we can say for certain, whatever the Holyrood result:  neither of them will be eager to form a coalition with the new pariahs of Scottish politics: the Liberal Democrats. 

Toryota Camron - Total Product Recall

 There are renewed fears for the future of the Toryota firm  this week as further flaws have been discovered in the company's leading models. The brand image of Toryota has been seerious damaged by the mass recall of thousands of policies over the last few weeks. Their once top selling model, the Camron - supposedly and environmentally friendly vehicle - has turned into an erratic death trap, unable to run in a straight line and seemingly having lost its ability to stop at junctions. 

    “My Camron is all over the place,” said one disgruntled buyeer. “You just don’t know where it’s going from one minute to the next”. In its latest mishap, the Camron careered into Scotland without proper guidance and ended up colliding with political reality.  Then it was found that the speedometer reading was out by a factor of ten. 

  Toryota had looked like becoming the top sellier in Britain during the last couple of years as its fresh-faced models benefited from a mass advertising campaign.  Pictures of the Camron appeared on billboards across the land, attracting much attention from consumers bored with other brands that have been looking their age.  But the shiny new exterior concealed serious flaws in the construction of the leading Toryota model. The billboard ads have had to be pulled from the hight streets because of online photoshop parodies.  

    Unpublished blueprints showed that there were unresolved issues in its financial management system.  Promises that it would be much cheaper to run a Camron, because of its new green image, turned out to be false. Its security system has also been giving trouble and many people who have bought the Camron say that it just doesn’t perform in they way that’s promised. Attempts to conceal the flaws in the Camron only made matters worse.  

Embarrassed company bosses have had to make grovelling apologies for ambitious early claims made for the vehicle.  Shares in Toryota have been on the slide since before Christmas and there are fears that punters could dump their stakes entirely before the all important public floatation in Westminster in May.

  Sales of Toryotas have been particularly weak in Scotland for a number of years. Toryota had become a by-word for flash, overpriced and English.   Earlier models simply couldn’t cope with the numerous potholes and zig zag bends in the Scottish high road.  Questioned about why he once again came to Scotland without a functioning sat nav, the boss of Toryota insisted that problems with the brand had been exaggerated. . “Look, Scots will be buying literally tens of Camrons come May 6th., you mark my words” he said.  “You can be taken for a ride by us or you can stick with  your boring old banger which isn’t going anywhere at all”   

   The government says it is considering extending for the popular scrappage scheme to cope an expected deluge of people trying to get rid of their Camrons in the next three months. 

David Cameron's speech: a triumph of ZZZZZZ

  I'd love to give you a complete and comprehensive blow by blow account of David Cameron's Manchester speech - but I started to doze off in the middle of it, and I can't be sure I got it all.  It's the first time I've ever drifted off in the middle of a leader's confrerence speech, espcially in an election year.  Either I'm getting too old, or David Cameron has taken his foot off the gas.

   I sense the latter.  Looking around there were a lot of Tories who looked like they were flirting with the land of nod.  It was a very downbeat speech, almost somnolent at times.  The only reall standers - where Cameron got off his couch and gave it laldy - were for Afghanistan and poverty.    His inequality sound bite was a good one.  It really nailed Labour's failure to deliver the social justice that is supposed to be its mission statement.  For once he looked the camera in the eye and showed that he is capable of passion.

   But the rest of it?  Well, you tell me. There was stuff about the NHS - he repeated that it sums up his political philosophy "in three letters".   There was a lot about good old-fashioned competitive education, though wisely he avoided the Troops to Teachers initiative of Staff Sergeant Michael Gove. There was a lot about entrepreneurs being the people who will rebuild the economy.  All very well.  But how can small businesses get off the ground if the big monopoly banks, fattened on public funds, refuse to lend the capital necessary to get new businesses started?  There was no coherent economic philosophy here.

   We got alot about debt, of course, but not about the people who got us into the debt crisis - the banks with thier excessive leverage and predatory lending to home owners.  There was nothing on housing - unless I missed it -  and culture seems to begin and end with the world cup bid in 2018.  You don't expect poetry  a from a political leader, but he could have given us a bit of vision surely.  The sunny uplands, which was his peroration, didn't convince.  It wasn't clear to me where these uplands are.  He talked of everyone setting up a business, which is as unlikely as it would be undesirable,; about choice in schools and hospital .  But his view from the summit appears to be a bit like an M&S vision of consumer choice, like Samantha's dress.

   The main policy theme was big government being the cause all our problems - and big government is bad when it is intrusive and takes away our liberties. He promised to scrap ID cards and end the surveillance state.  But all politicians want to slim down the bureaucracies - it is a political cliche. Like the 'bonfire of the quangos' which fortunately Cameron didn't offer.  And really, it is ludicrous to blame the financial crisis on big government - it was the big banks wot done it.  Intriguingly, he hardly mentioned the free market - perhaps because we don't have one any more - only socialism for the City.

  
     Will it convince the nation?  Well, there was nothing too objectionalble.  It wasn't militarist or triumphalist.  He sounds like a decent guy with a decent wife who has decent ane  reasonable views.  He is much more agreeable than mad Gordon Brown, so maybe he has done enough.  Just wake me when he wins, will you.

Why do the Tories hate Europe so much?

How ironic it would be if the Tories were to fall apart again over Europe, just as David Cameron is entering the home straight for Number Ten.  Almost as ironic as Tony Blair becoming president of the EU, just as Gordon Brown loses the next general election.  Some people are just born lucky. But is David Cameron one of them?

   Surely you say, the Tories couldn’t be so stupid to have a row about Lisbon. Surely they realise that this is no time for division; no time for a lapse into xenophobia, just when he voters were thinking the Conservatives had put all that anti-foreigner stuff behind them. Well, no one ever lost money by overestimating the stupidity of political parties.  A majority of Tory supporters, according to the website Conservativehome, would be happy to leave the EU altogether.  It’s not just the Lisbon Treaty, with its qualified majority voting and common foreign policy, they want to dump.  

   But their bottom line is a referendum on Lisbon and the are pressing David Cameron to give them what they want, even if - as everyone expects after the decisive Irish vote - the treaty is ratified by the two remaining doubters, Poland and the Czech Republic. Tory eurosceptics have already forced Cameron to join forces in the European parliament with right wing loonies like the Latvian For Freedom and Fatherland, which honours the Waffen SS. Europe has already eclipsed most of Cameron’s pre-conference policy proposals on elderly care, welfare reform and public spending. 

   What is it about Europe that really gets the Tory goat?  The European Union is not a federal superstate, but a fairly loose confederation of sovereign nations who unite to meet specific economic objectives.  It is exactly what David Cameron said he wanted the EU to be in his Andrew Marr interview yesterday:”an association of states not a country”.  But suspicion of Europe, and of Germany in particular, is deeply rooted in the Tory psyche. We learned recently that, in 1989, Margaret Thatcher was so worried about the possibility of a united Germany dominating Europe that she asked the soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to stop civil rights demonstrators tearing down the Berlin Wall

    This kind of paranoia clearly dies hard. We are dealing with something that isn’t entirely rational - it is about a pervasive sense of national insecurity in middle England - you just don’t get it up here -; a fear that somehow Britain will wake up one day and find that it is no longer run from Westminster but from Brussels. Many eurosceptics think we already are.   Perhaps it is something to do with the legacy of British imperialism - an inability to accept the reality that Britain is now just another country in Europe and not a regional superpower.   

   But there is a new generation of voters today who are used to travelling around Europe, don’t believe that it is a threat to Britain, and really don’t like having to change their money at the border.  Don’t the Tories listen to their pals in industry and commerce who are fed up with currency fluctuations that make a lottery of their investment decisions?  Not even the Icelanders are anti-European nowadays.  Only Britain remains fearful of contamination from the ‘continent’. 

   The EU has been astonishingly successful, not just in promoting prosperity  but in promoting peaceful coexistence between nations. Tories scorn this idea, claiming that peace in Europe has nothing to do with Brussels and a lot to do with globalisation.  True, the internationalisation of economic life has made the idea of war between France and Germany seem ridiculous. But look at Central and Eastern Europe and it isn’t, and the prospect of joining the EU has been a powerful and genuine force for peace.  It is not inconceivable that there could have been war or communal unrest in the Baltic states, for example, had they not been so desperate to join the EU.  The Balkans too are learning to live together since they too want to be part of the European club, and that means no ethnic cleansing,  no funny business about borders and no goose-stepping military parades.  

  The EU has created an entirely new kind of international political entity: a country without a state.  Speaking personally, I could do with a little more state - a more democratic one. The European parliament has very limited power. Under Lisbon, the first ever president will be chosen by the heads of the member states rather than by the people - which helps explain why Tony Blair is likely to win when he wouldn’t have had a cat in hell’s chance of winning an election because of Iraq.   

   The euro, introduced simultaneously in 16 states in January 2002 amid scorn from eurosceptics in Britain. It is now the second largest reserve currently in the world used daily by 327 million Europeans. We’ve just been through the worst financial crisis in sixty years, and the euro has thrived.  The main reason why Ireland voted so decisively for the Lisbon Treaty was because the credit crunch has reminded them just reliant they are now on the European Central Bank . 

  

  Precisely! say the eurosceptics - the German bundesbankers have little Ireland under their heel, just as they always planned.  Britain never, never, never will be a slave to the ECB.   Really, there is no arguing with Conservative anti-Europeans, which is why David Cameron gave into them in 2005 and promised them a referendum on Lisbon.  Without that pledge he would not be leader today, and they are now calling it in. On TV yesterday, Cameron sounded deeply unconvincing when he said that he didn’t want to talk about holding a referendum if Lisbon is ratified - which after Ireland it almost certainly will be - because it might “undermine or prejudice” the debates taking place in member states.  But that’s precisely what the eurosceptics want him to do: provide a beacon to those few remaining free peoples of Europe.  Take on the Brussels beast single-handed if necessary.  

    But the voters of Britain are watching very carefully.  If the Manchester conference turns into a rabble of foam flecked anti-Europeans, dictating terms to Cameron, then the people might decide that, after all, the Tories aren’t quite ready for power. The next forty eight hours will be crucial.