Crises of Capitalism - 4 comments

A vast amount of coverage, but very little response from myself, thus far. I'm going to diverge from most Labour bloggers by linking to this piece (via S&M), which is a succinct response to the doom-mongers (my emphasis):

On greed, let me repeat: If unusually many airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can't explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual. And let me add: This isn't a morality play. What we're seeing are the consequences of monetary-policy distortions of interest rates and regulatory distortions of incentives, amplified in some degree by private imprudence, not the consequences of blackheartedness.

And what all of this points out is that laying the finger of blame on "the free market" is utterly in error, but it's an error that's going to get made continually over the months and years to come. If there's one thing those of us on this side of the battle of ideas can do as this all unfolds, it's to do whatever we can to remind people that the interventionist economy that caused the problems and led to privatized profits and socialized losses (and the "solutions" that will further socialize losses) are NOT "the free market." Asking why anyone would think bigger government will solve these problems when it was the major cause is another public service we can provide.

That is to say, profits and wealth for some, unemployment for many.

Many bloggers have argued for tighter regulation of the financial sector. Having kissed a career in financial software goodbye, this month, I'm glad not to be able to comment on particular measures, but my general view is that markets work because they are unregulated, or have been able to work deftly around regulations, just as free trade works - and makes the world richer, and less susceptible to anti-democratic regimes - because it is free. Only political faith is enough to convince people that individual governments are smart and nimble to introduce regulations that are enforceable in an open, international economy.

Free markets do not equal Capitalism, and if there's ever to be a viable Socialism - unencumbered by nationalism and corruption - markets will be free there too, which is identical to saying that economic and social interactions between equal (I know, but read on) individuals will be unrestricted, as they must be in a (I know, but read on) democracy. In practice, Capitalism operates in polities where political and economic rights are unfairly allocated, as they have been for centuries, and where the powerful owe their success to layer upon layer of theft, patronage, and downright luck. The mass of the population have little practical economic freedom, and even relatively benign Governments/States have little to offer.

So when Paulie argues in the comments of this post that "unregulated markets are not compatible with representative democracy", yes, sure, but (a) we (sadly) don't, yet, have workable democratic international institutions; (b) I'm going to suggest that individual economic actions are too nuanced - too frequent - to be able to be scrutinised by politicians, without them having to be made much less easy. There are two axes on the do/don't regulate, do/don't offer a safety-net chart, and I'm suggesting a move not from 'don't/don't' to 'do/don't' but to 'don't/do'. So my solution is similar to S&M's:

The state cannot [...]manage the economy to remove all fluctuations. What it should do is help protect people from the consequences of downturns.

It can provide a more robust welfare safety-net. It can guarantee a Minimum Income for all. It can insure (yes, insurance) - or enable individuals to insure themselves - against a loss of their job or a decline in income. It can encourage mutual ownership of businesses. If billions can be spent injecting liquidity into the banking and insurance sectors, in the hope of saving jobs and businesses, that money could instead be used to fund exactly such an insurance scheme.

This is indeed an opportunity for the political Left. The opportunity is, firstly, to rediscover the economic Left. Secondly, to avoid reverting to Statism. Thirdly, to look Capitalism in the face and take what works - genuinely free markets and competition - and throw out what doesn't - 'favoured' corporations, preferential loans, Corporatism, a fawning appreciation of the power of 'business' in defiance of economic analysis (e.g. when determining corporation tax rates, or when determining the highest earners to be the best and brightest).

The opportunity comes not from any innate anti-Capitalism, but because (a) Labour is in power for at least another 18 months; (b) it should be the work of a moment to demonstrate to people that Cameron is for the status-quo, not for reform; and (c) because Labour needs a bit of intellectual direction. Embracing economic reform, and providing a safety net more secure than any offered in the past, might just do the job.

Tory blogs, and Labour strategy - 7 comments

There's been a fair bit of debate, over the past few days, concerning the extent to which Labour blog/bloggers should engage with Tory blogs.

The case Labour Matters makes over at Labourhome, and elsewhere, is quite simple. When it comes to Conservative blogs, read them and thus know your enemy, but avoid linking to the larger, mainstream media (MSM)-favoured ones because this boosts their authority with Google and other search engines, and makes their opinions appear more respectable. That means avoiding playing along with their memes and surveys, and giving up the naive dream that they will link back to you and drive vast amounts of traffic to your own site.

There are a few wider points:

• If the MSM are lazy enough to crib from a small pool of supersized right-wing blogs, while that might be preferable to them inventing stories off the top of their heads, we ought to aim to supplant them as our source of news. The only MSM outlets I regularly consult are the BBC News site, and The Economist. I'm sure I could give up the former easily enough. The latter would be harder to give up, but this would still be a start.
• Labour types should read non-Labour-supporting blogs more, and assimilate what they are saying:
  
  • For starters, the more evidence there is that public opinion is shifting to the right, the more important it is to be able to refute arguments that originate from the right, and to expose your own to scrutiny.
    
  • Those whose standard fare is to criticise the "left" or the "right" of the Labour Party must treat such critiques as purely intellectual exercises. Some people are rightly concerned with resolving arguments, not simply supporting the Labour Party, and who are we to tell anyone what they can and cannot post? But still...
    
  • If it isn't possible to honestly refute a hostile argument from a standard Labour position, that's a problem. One solution is to consult the blogs of our cousins from the non-Labour left for intellectual help.
  • Recognise that references to "Thatcherite" and "right-wing" are threadbare terms, and unlikely to carry much weight with intelligent people (as "Fascist" or "imperialist" have been for about the last six decades). See the next point for more.
    
• Blogs that display hostility to those from other political persuasions, or that make absurd generalisations about their opponents, are intellectual graveyards. Bloggers make mistakes when they first start out, but who in their right mind enters into a debate with someone who has already demonstrated a refusal to acknowledge the arguments of their opponents, and who is too wrapped up in themselves, or their own politics, to adapt their position? These bigots might think they do the work of their preferred political party, but they delude themselves doubly, restrict their own traffic/popularity, and are unlikely to be of much help to that party in the long term. My advice:
  • Don't become one of these unhappy bloggers.
    
  • Attempt to convert any such blogger you find. One approach is a "good blogger, bad blogger" combination: eviscerate their arguments, but follow-up with friendliness. This is the Labour Way.
    
• Pro-Labour bloggers should join - and participate fully in - Bloggers4Labour and any other similar blogging network, to increase their exposure, disseminate their news stories, to learn what other bloggers are saying, and to challenge their opinions and those of others.

Update (10/09): slight rewording.

Defending "secondary action" - 6 comments

Secondary action - "[...] strike action that is initiated by workers in one industry and supported by workers in a separate but related industry or profession. [...] the purpose of the strike is to support, and express sympathy for, the primary strikers." - is one of those issues that particularly polarises opinion. It's vitally important, say the bolder bloggers on the Labour left ("even" Roy Hattersley here); on the other hand, to those who believe themselves to be moderates, legalising secondary action exemplifies "a return to the 1970s": disaster would ensue.

I'd agree with those who say that to fight David Cameron on this territory would be insane: secondary action is still political death with the press the way it is. Still, it's an interesting issue, and perhaps - far from being a transitional demand - it's quite justifiable in a liberal-left framework, where other union-friendly policies are not.

Let's put it this way: in the UK, the right to join, and campaign within, a trade union (or any group) is a right due to all individuals. The rights of a trade union come through being a vessel for individuals to exercise their rights, providing the union acts democratically, and providing also that individuals who don't agree with their union's actions are not penalised - for example, by being coerced to support a strike that the majority have approved (unions must adhere to this latter provision, I'm less sure that members always feel bound by it.)

So the individual's right is to enjoy a relationship with a union, with individual secondary action simply an application of that existing right. Though they will be affected in practice by individuals' actions, employers are irrelevant to the question of individuals' rights, as are the employers of the friends and "comrades" the individual chooses to support for whatever reason. The union's secondary action rights are plainly an aggregation of the rights of their members, democratically expressed.

Critics might say: "where will it end, if unions can strike on the basis of sympathy with others, rather than distinct disputes?" This sounds very much like a "rights, but only so far" argument. Rights are there to be pushed as far as they will go. If they can't be pushed, they're worthless, and at the very same time, they cease to be rights.

Trade unionists must have the right to invoke secondary action - whether it may succeed is another matter altogether. Withholding the ability of a union to engage in secondary action is breaching the rights of the majority of members who invoked it.

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However, trade unionists do not own the right to achieve any particular outcome on behalf of their union, because other parties - employers, customers, the general public - are involved. "Rights" over other individuals cannot be bought without being paid for. Thus, once a strike begins, employers, customers, and the general public must have the same freedom to bypass ("break" if you insist) the action if they don't agree with it.

Furthermore, when the rights of non-strikers are curtailed by public-sector monopolies - passengers have no choice of London Underground train providers, for instance - Governments are obliged to intervene. All of this is potentially very problematic for unions: extending individuals' ability to retaliate (legal action?) against strike action could seriously blunt the strike weapon.

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I have changed my line somewhat from last August, when I expressed suspicion at calls for "trade union freedom", but I believe I've provided a robust, but "neutral" justification for the idea of trade union rights and freedom this time. Clearly that approach gives to unions with one hand, and take away with another. The reason I'm still suspicious of the campaign is that even if unions do justify secondary action on the basis of individual rights, I see no sign that supporters recognise the same rights within the general public, nor do they appear to have any concerns over the disproportionate power that unions would be able to wield by using secondary action within public-sector monopolies, especially when both the Government and the economy are relatively weak.

In practice, unions that demand - at Labour's lowest ebb - the return of long-lost rights, are pissing in the wind. However "energised" success might make them, their influence will end the moment the Conservatives win the next General Election, and how well they survive over the next five or ten years - under a Government for whom libertarianism works in only one direction, to their political friends - is an interesting, though unpalatable question.

Conservative Foreign Policy - no comments

Nick Cohen on Tory attitudes to Europe and the rest of the world:

[...] Anti-conservatism may no longer stir the left, but opposition to Europe burns as brightly as ever on the right. The Tories are committed to pulling out of the European political bloc which includes Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right parties, ordinarily Cameron's natural allies, and heading off with the chauvinist parties of Russia and eastern Europe.

Far from standing up to Putin, the Conservatives tried to help a Putin stooge take over the Council of Europe, which oversees the European Court of Human Rights, of all things. Mainstream European conservatives were as loud in their condemnations of Cameron as mainstream socialists. Caroline Jackson, one of the few Conservative members of the European Parliament who wants to work with Britain's allies, wrote in the Financial Times that her Tory colleagues 'now have a bad reputation [rapidly getting worse] for crass and offensive behaviour'

[...]

A Cameron government will tear up the complex web of alliances and understandings through which Britain exercises her influence. It is about time journalists asked him what he intends to put in their place.

Rather depressing: (a) because Labour's foreign policy, internationalism, record of involvement with developing countries, and of condemning human rights abuses, since 1997, has been a good one - certainly a proud one by British standards; (b) a failure (perhaps) to sell that to the electorate, coupled with our national insularity and hypocrisy, means the Tory Party's stance is unlikely to cost them any votes. Far from it.

Hypocrisy over Haltemprice - 5 comments

I think this is a fairly typical response from Labour bloggers to David Davis's by-election victory:

The man, David Davis, is a complete nutter, having put his constituents of Haltemprice and Howden through a phoney by-election for the sake of his own super ego. The man who thought 42 days to question terrorist suspects was too much and violated the principles of Magna Carta was nevetheless happy to support 28 days. This nutter wasted money on a phoney election merely to satisfy his personal ego. This by-election proved nothing except confirm its status as a safe Tory seat.

As such it's a thoroughly unreasonable collection of speculative personal attacks and irrelevant or unsubstantiated claims, that dodges the issues in order to gain some measly political advantage.

You'd almost think Labour bloggers supported the 42-day detention proposal. If I had to sum up the reaction from last month, I can't remember more than one or two favourable responses from bloggers who weren't Councillors or MPs.

The point I tried to make last month was that (aside from Davis's character being irrelevant to the issue at hand) that this was an opportunity for us all to combat the illiberal attitudes of the general public, that some of us believe were the real driver of the 42-day proposal, and others in a similar vein. If Davis did succeed in changing attitudes, at least in Haltemprice and Howden, then good - liberal attitudes are in all of our best interests, whatever party we associate with.The idea that you can temporarily breach your own deeply-held values for political advantage is not one I want to be associated with.

Willful waste - 1 comment

'Stop wasting food', urges Brown. It's a shame people have concentrated on what this means for Britain - supposedly £8 of food being thrown away per week by the average household - rather than on this somewhat more damning statistic:

[...] up to 40% of food harvested in developing countries can be lost before it is consumed, due to the inadequacies of processing, storage and transport.

Not being able to sell their products affects the livelihoods of far more people, who have far less to live on.

It is a little ridiculous for Brown to have to ask people to change their own behaviour in order to save themselves some money. However correct the cause, Governments have to allow individuals to make their own mistakes (to remind them is embarrassing for all concerned), and to address those mistakes themselves by buying less food if the £8 is indeed worth their while saving. Besides, this wastage of food probably helps rather than hinders poor food producers, so I must declare myself neutral on this aspect (read: blind alley) of the global food debate.

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One thing that immediately struck me when reading the piece, though, was: would the Government have been brave enough to suggest that people might save money by using less petrol, or that by borrowing less they might insulate themselves from rising interest rates? People inevitably realise this and adapt accordingly, but the reaction to a politician stating it would be furious.

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Returning to food, the Conservatives miss the point as usual:

Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said government departments should set a better example.

[...] But while the government is telling households to reduce food waste it has no idea how much food it is throwing away itself. This is yet again a clear case of the government saying 'do as we say not as we do'.

Feeble. Meanwhile, Lib Dem environment spokesman, Steve Webb, blames supermarkets:

Supermarkets make it harder for householders to avoid food waste, while throwing away large quantities of edible food through poor stock management. [...]

In this era of long-life food, fridges, and freezers, and with food generally being non-addictive, the only justification for not eating food before the use-by date is either greed, or (in my case) laziness. Please credit the people with some intelligence. As for stock management, supermarkets already pay a penalty for poor decisions, by being unable to sell food they've paid for, and by having to pay for its disposal, something shoppers would otherwise have done. These feel like big enough incentives already.

David Davis' resignation - 11 comments

Call me wet behind the ears, but I've been surprised by the amount of hostility directed at David Davis, who (for the benefit of future readers) resigned today as Shadow Home Secretary - even from those who ought to agree with him in their opposition to the 42-day detention plan.

He's an MP, elected to support his party, and to express his own views, and the concerns of his constituents. Clearly he's already addressing points (1) and (2), and it's apparent that he's prompting a by-election to address point (3). Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Besides, elections are a Good Thing, and democracy has no price, so to talk of 'frivolity' and 'wastes of taxpayer's money' shows a grotesque attitude to democracy. It isn't a risk-free strategy either: seats only appear to be 'safe' until a remarkable independent candidate comes along and turns the election on its head; and as I keep saying, vote tallies start at zero and increment, they don't decrement - party majorities are no more that statistics.

If these initial reactions are anything to go by, Labour's big guns are going to take a depressingly contemptuous line. Take this, from David Blunkett:

David Davis's behaviour is a pure piece of political theatre [...] This is childish and immature and it is not worthy of a major political party to engage in such theatre.

As good an advertisement as I've heard not to enter party politics (if one were needed). Thanks, DB.

Equally tawdry, I feel, would be the decision not to field a Labour candidate at the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. That would be a decision bound to salt the earth for the local CLP and the PPC, who might well pay the price at a local level for years to come. Whatever our individual views, Labour, nationally, has made its decision, and so it must stick up for its policy, whether that allows it to hold its vote, or costs it a deposit. The Lib Dems are entitled not to stand if they fully support the Conservatives, but Labour can't withdraw too, leaving one side of the argument/electorate with no (mainstream) representative.

Returning to the democratic point: needless to say, the 42-day plan doesn't cease to be illiberal or (probably) unnecessary even in the event that the electorate does back it (the interventions of the loathsome Kelvin McKenzie and Rupert Murdoch are surely proof enough - via Phil), but if some good is to come out of this affair, it would come from Davis and the Lib Dems eroding that apparent public support, and changing public attitudes for the better.

Don't, by any means, take that as an endorsement, but the task for Labour activists during this by-election is the same as it ever was: to battle illiberal and conservative ideas and values, with liberal, cooperative, and socialist ones. It would be a shame if, in doing so, we couldn't hope for a Labour MP to be elected.

Still no to 42 - 1 comment

Sadly the Government has still not managed to make a reasonable case for the extension of the detention-without-trial limit. If they cannot satisfy our concerns about the human rights of suspects; cannot provide any evidence that the extension from 28 days to 42 has ever, or is likely either to prevent terrorist incidents or to substantially increase the chances of information being extracted; and cannot provide any assurance that 42 would be a binding upper limit; then the proposal ought to be thrown out with as little fuss as possible.

Offering 'concessions' seems to completely miss the point. Whether you prefer to oppose 42 on principle, or over its likelihood of success, the whole idea of concessions seems irrelevant to the issue at hand, and, if anything, adds insult to injury.

The fact that the Prime Minister has staked his authority upon the vote is a problem he has made entirely for himself. The fact that the Conservatives and minor parties might profit - in the very short term, as Frank Dobson argues - is an unfortunate but necessary evil.

According to YouGov, 69% of the public supports raising the detention limit to 42 days "in exceptional circumstances". Firstly, the 700-odd people who stated this opinion are foolish to do so, but they can hardly be blamed for telling a pollster that they might agree to limit their own rights when the issue is not close to home, when alternatives have not been proposed, and when the issues have not seriously debated with them. What's more: they're no more foolish than those who cannot see that "exceptional circumstances" means different things to different people. Such circumstances appear to be the case right now for some; while for others, only some distant war might fit the bill. One doesn't need to be in denial of the terrorist threat to dismiss this argument; those who cite "exceptional circumstances" are responsible for clarifying what these circumstances are.

As it stands, the poll resolves nothing, thus honest commentators will take it with an appropriate shovel of salt.

The Telegraph continues:

The Government's case was boosted when Baroness Park, a Tory peer and former senior MI6 officer, came out in support of stronger detention powers. She told The Telegraph that the "frightening" scale and complexity of the global Islamic terrorist threat made the new laws a necessity.

"Everyone who knows the difficulties of investigating it is convinced," she said, adding that David Cameron and the Conservative leadership were wrong to be opposing the measures.

Needless to say, what 'frightens' a campaigner for a cause might not frighten a neutral party. The death cult that is Islamist terrorism is a pressing threat to any country, and to any individual (especially Muslims) that favours freedom, tolerance, and what makes human beings human. But Baroness Park's job is not merely to convince the Government, or the Conservatives, of the danger, but other Western politicians, plenty of whom are equally forthright in their opposition to terror, but who have not so far found the need to extend detention without trial. Let us take a cautious approach, then: once Baroness Park and the Government have begun to win over other politicians to their case, we can revisit the extension proposal. Until then, we treat her opinion as one among many.

Luke Akehurst makes the point, in supporting the Government's move, that the need to prevent atrocities is more pressing than concern for the liberty of suspects. Now, I am prepared to believe that the security services wouldn't abuse these powers in general. Sadly, this faith is not binding upon the security services, who are beyond my control, and your control too. The reason we have codified liberties is because all of us have a right to a private space, free of encroachment, and to protect us from good people as well as bad, because even 'well-meaning' States, authorities, and individuals cannot be relied upon to respect us. No need to invoke Shami Chakrabarti, or even George Orwell, here.

The Government's on much safer ground with its deradicalisation plan, via Norm.

P.S. This post delayed, due to Blogger, once again, refusing to play ball.

Microgeneration: the spin - 3 comments

The Register has a new article that cuts through a lot of the misleading claims about microgeneration, which many have seen as a cheap and efficient way to cut emissions, and as an alternative to developing new nuclear facilities.

The Guardian, amongst others, has put a very favourable spin upon the Department for Business, Energy and Regulatory Reform's recent report. The Conservatives back microgeneration (warning: PDF file), naturally, it being seen as the warm, fluffy option. See also this. On our side, John McDonnell MP is banging the drum too (my emphasis):

When Labour backbenchers were pressing to include in this legislation early action to introduce feed-in tariffs for altenative energy produced by homes and community organisations the Government refused to co-operate and instead offered yet another consultation over the coming year, delaying the whole process by at least another year and possibly longer. In Germany and other European countries the introduction of feed in tariffs has resulted in a dramatic increase in alternative energy production.

The Register, though, is scathing:

[...] This subsidy plan would continue to cost the taxpayer £5.5bn each year forever, according to the report - that's as much as we currently spend on defence procurement, or enough money to buy 55 terawatt-hours of electricity every year at consumer prices, well over 15 per cent of the national leccy bill. And of course, we'd all still be paying our normal energy bills as well, and we'd still have done nothing to clean up the other 99 per cent of our energy usage.

By comparison, a nuclear power station half again as big as Sizewell B is said by French makers EDF to cost about £2bn and by most other people to cost about £3bn. Four billion quid's worth of nuke stations would produce as much low-to-zero-carbon electricity as the headline microgen plan, which would cost conservatively five times as much just in subsidies - forget about the costs to the users. Even given swingeing regulatory, maintenance, staffing, decommissioning and waste-management costs (plus some pocket change for fuel) it's not surprising that the nuclear energy industry - unlike the microgeneration one - does not consider that it needs any subsidy at all in the UK. [...]

And it gets worse. If grid electricity can be decarbonised even partially - by building wind farms or nuclear stations, say - the eco benefits of microgeneration disappear. We would find ourselves subsidising people to spew carbon unnecessarily, in fact. The report shows quite clearly that if the carbon burden of grid power can be halved, then burning gas in the home becomes a very eco-unfriendly thing to do, no matter how cunning the machinery used. Subsidies for CHP et al would then be highly un-green, as they would actually drive up carbon emissions rather than reduce them. Only heat-pumps, and perhaps some biomass kit, would be eco-worthwhile if grid electricity were less dirty.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

I don't have any ideological preference in favour of nuclear power, but it's beholden upon those who have an ideological, or opportunistic, opposition to it, to do some research before jumping on any bandwagon that seems to be travelling in the other direction.

Celebrity Tory candidate plan backfires shock - no comments

Here's Tory by-election candidate, Tony Lit (to his friends) pictured at a Labour Party fund-raising dinner (also here), with his political friend, later, arch-enemy, Tony Blair, just 5 days after paying this nice cheque, 7 days before joining the Conservative Party, and one additional day before being 'parachuted in' as Tory candidate.



I imagine you're lucky if you don't work in a profession where you're expected to smile for the camera whichever saint or scum-bag you're stood next to. All the same, you have to wonder about the intellectual seriousness of any political animal who's prepared to look so relaxed with a party leader when their views are so in flux that they jump party within a week of the photo having been taken (this logic applies just as readily to defecting members of Parliament). In the unlikely event of David Cameron appearing at a function I was invited to, I doubt I'd be able to crack much of a smile with him even if I was wobbling, politically (which, thanks to DC, I'm a very long way from doing).

I don't know anything about Lit's political views. He might be reasonable for all I know, but appearing to be a fraud from Day 1 isn't a good start: with luck we won't have to worry after Thursday, July 19th.

Thanks - and apologies - to Mr W and Mr B.

Grantham and Stamford go Labour - 6 comments

Quentin Davies MP's defection to Labour is a great publicity coup for what we should now be calling the new Brown/Harman team. If they can continue to appear fresh, dynamic, cunning, and also lucky, then the sooner the vacuous Cameron effect will be neutralised, and perhaps the sooner the media will convince us that policy differences are worth the public's while again.

But amidst the celebrations on our side, not all bloggers are sure the new recruit is worthy of our wholehearted support. Owen at Labour's Fightback is quite right to remind us that Davies is not a social liberal in the manner we have come to expect of Labour MPs since the elimination of the old Right in the 1970s and 80s (Tory Alan Duncan says so much himself). Davies' record on homosexual rights can be seen here - green (on the right-hand side) is good, and there isn't any. And yet he would not be alone amongst Labour MPs, so it would hardly be consistent to disbar him and not others, who have a mandate both from the electorate and their own party members.

Davies is unlikely to change his views at this stage in his life/career, and can't live down a lifetime of opposition to the reasonable left; as his switching party neither helps nor harms the social liberal consensus, it can only really be enjoyed for its pretty devastating criticism of the Cameronite Conservative party, extracts of which can be found here, here, and everywhere else beside. There's very little to disagree with, apart perhaps from the tone. Sure, there's some evidence that the Tories were making progress, but thinking back to last year, when I feared they might make a pitch that could sweep up wavering Blairites en masse, I can't help but feel now that the strategy has completely failed. The battered red squares hold; the slowed, demoralised, blue cavalry forced to skirt around the edges.

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I'm curious: do MPs switching to Labour face mandatory re-selection for the next General Election? I don't know. There must be a tremendously strong case for having such a rule if it doesn't already exist.

Nick Robinson - on board 'Project Cameron'? - 1 comment

Paulie has the full story:

[...] After all, because Robinson has a Tory background (though he doesn’t mention his mid-'80s role as Chairman of the Young Conservatives in the biography that he publishes on his blog), he must already be a suspect clandestine member of 'Project Cameron.'

His idiotic sensationalism certainly makes him sound like one most of the time.

Supporters of public service broadcasting can only hope that Nick Robinson isn’t tipping Guido off though, and I expect that phone records could be examined to clear up any doubt. I would suggest that his superiors at the BBC should think about holding an internal enquiry into this – and publishing the results by way of reassurance.