In reality, there’s little difference between the positions of the different parties, nor much change in the position of any individual party over the last couple of decades.

Across the mainstream political spectrum, few disagree that handing out state benefits too freely causes two big problems. First, the easier it is to get benefits, the more people will abuse the system. In purely financial terms it may not add up to much against tax evasion, but politically it’s very visible and no-one likes to see their neighbours stealing from the State when they’re working every hour to support their family.

Secondly, having whole families – sometimes several generations – hooked on welfare to the extent that getting a job or a decent education just isn’t seen as an option worth considering is bad for those individuals as well as the state.

The answer, of course, is to change the criteria for benefits and the incentives to work so that it becomes harder and riskier to cheat the system and relatively more beneficial to get a job – along with some additional help for those who need it.

Except that no-one has figured out how to do that without it resulting in more people falling through the gaps.

Labour in Government decided to crack down on Incapacity Benefit, believing that many of the people claiming IB could and should be working (for their own benefit, as well as to reduce the bill to taxpayers). The result was that in the process of achieving that aim, many people seem to have been wrongly identified as fit to work and are losing out.

The key to understanding the problem faced by all governments is that this seems to be inevitable for any welfare reform – it’s too big, too complicated and people will always fall through the gaps.

Depending on the politics of the day, parties may choose to stress one aspect or the other in the quest we all have to win votes, but the reality of the challenge changes little.

The government of the day tries to get more people off benefits and attempts to figure out a way of doing it that somehow minimises the number of genuine claimants falling through the gaps, with varying degrees of success. The politicians tweak it depending on their priorities to end up with more of fewer people claiming the relevant benefit.

What politicians say and how they say it can matter – it can affect the national mood, for example. And we political activists will naturally interpret the actions of any government in line with our political views. But behind the words, variations on the same old policies face the same old challenges and problems.

Universal Credit is the latest way many see to square the circle – it looks encouraging but whether it turns out to be more successful than others remains to be seen.

Government cuts? MPs expenses? Greedy bankers? Broken society?

Maybe.

Or perhaps there’s less need to panic and more need to take a measured view.

Might it be that this sort of trouble – relatively common in societies – is similar to earthquakes? Tiny earthquakes and tremors occur across the world most of the time and we barely notice. Every now and again a much bigger earthquake hits – causing major damage and disruption. Is that because something in the bowels of the earth fundamentally changed? No, it’s simply that the complex myriad of variables that decide when, where and how powerful an earthquake will be happen to come together (most things work this way).

The “some big change has caused this” theme is helped along by a strange collective amnesia about past events, even quite recent ones.

Have a glance through Wikipedia’s list of riots.

London, 2010. Luton, 2009. Manchester, 2008. Looting in Devon, 2007. Birmingham 2005. Bradford and Oldham 2001 – the list goes on and on, and we could follow it back over the centuries. Yes, 2011 saw more rioting and more looting, but do we really have the evidence that it’s down to some fundamental shift in society and not just a random peak – an unusually severe earthquake?

Our society has many problems – politicians disagree on what they are, their causes and solutions to some extent, but they certainly exist.

The risk of jumping to conclusions is that we start putting a lot of time, money and effort into fixing the “problems” that we divine to have caused these riots, though they might not actually be the issues most in need of fixing. We could spend billions chasing phantoms.

There are many things to be glad about in our modern lives.

We live in a society that’s healthier and wealthier than at any time in history (yes, there’s a small downward blip in wealth at the moment, but we’re still a long, long way ahead of previous generations). Crime has halved since 1995 and we’re living longer than ever before.

There are many people in our society who are – unjustly – poorer than they should be, leading more stressful and less happy lives than they could, but few in this country live in the absolute poverty that still afflicts millions of people around the globe.

No longer is it common to see families with ten people living in single a damp, squalid basement room with no windows, little furniture, an outside toilet shared between 30 or 40 households and so little money that clothes have to be pawned at the beginning of each week just to get the funds to put food on the table.

Plenty of people lived that way little more than a century ago in all our major cities.

Our task is to build on the successes of the last century, to acknowledge how far we’ve come as a society and to challenge ourselves to do even better.

There’s plenty of work still to be done. Poverty and unjust inequalities must be tackled, in all their forms. We’ve come a long way, but we can go further.

Last week’s riots and looting must be a catalyst that spurs our politicians and our society to take the next steps.

Fairly, firmly and justly punishing rioters and looters is essential, but if we spend the next year just searching for what caused a few thousand people (from the sixty million in the UK) to riot and loot, and then trying to fix that cause, we will have failed.

If we instead ask ourselves, with renewed vigour and purpose, how we can grasp the challenge to build a society that’s more free, more fair, more open, a society where no-one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity…then we have the chance to win.

That’s the argument put forward by Simon Titley in the latest Liberator magazine and I have to confess that he says a great deal that I agree with.

He’s right say that the party has a smaller core vote than the other two big parties (ours is around 10%, Labour and the Conservatives around 25%, Simon suggests – and I’m sure those figures are roughly correct).  He’s also right to say that the party has shied away from promoting itself philosophically.  We rarely say “this is the sort of person who’s a Lib Dem”, other than in the broadest sense, because that would naturally tell a big chunk of the electorate that they’re not Lib Dems and shouldn’t vote for us.

Simon’s argument is that, by focusing on local issues at the expense of saying what we stand for and nailing our colours to the mast, we’ve reaped the rewards in the good times, but we’re now paying the price.  Being in power means making hard decisions, not always being the nice guys.  It means making decisions that please some people and anger others – there’s no way round it.  Many people who supported the issues we championed now dislike us for the choices we’ve made.  What worked for us reasonably well in the years of opposition is failing us now we’re in power.

So is he right?

Let’s look at the core vote issue.  Labour and the Conservatives benefit from a larger core vote due to a feeling among many that one or the other is “their party”, whether it’s because their family always voted that way, or they believe the party is on their side.

But you’ll be looking long and hard to find that coming through in the literature or speeches from either party.  Like the Lib Dems, they don’t want to alienate chunks of the electorate (other than small minority groups such as bankers, who are fair game for everyone; or groups that they’re confident are never going to support them in significant numbers whatever they do).

Big parties steer clear of ideology.  They’re broad churches that encompass a wide range of views, and the idea that a unifying ideology for any of our main parties could be painted in anything other than the broadest brush strokes is ludicrous.  When one party states a philosophical position, you can almost always guarantee that exactly the same beliefs – perhaps wrapped in slightly different language – would feel just as natural from the lips of a politician of a different creed (“Education, education, education”, “Save the NHS”, “British jobs for British workers”?)

Within each party there are people with significantly different views on political philosophy and policy, but we work together because the alternative is to be in a tiny little party populated just with “people like us” that never gets a sniff of power – never has the opportunity to put those ideas into practise.

The parties also steer clear because all the evidence is that the voters aren’t very interested.  Politicians who want to test that theory should try putting different types of stories on their blogs and seeing how many readers each gets.  I’ve tried it, and I can tell you that my voters want to read about local stories of interest to them – the more local, the better – and really couldn’t give a monkeys about policy or philosophy.  Why should they?  I’m the one hooked on politics – they’ve got other things in their lives.

Simon’s right in many of the problems he identifies, but I’m not convinced about the solutions.

Lib Dems – like politicians of all parties – often do get sucked into being town hall administrators when they’re in power and often have problems identifying a distinctively “Lib Dem” way of running the council (though there’s a great deal of work being done on that, not least within the LGA).

We do have a smaller core vote than the other parties – and we always have.

We’ve not been as effective as fighting the air war in elections as we could have been (though I think that’s got a lot more to do with lack of money and media access than to do with not wanting to fight a good air war).

And I think many in the party have been taken aback by the tribal response to the Coalition amongst large sections of the electorate.  The Lib Dems have supported partnership politics and coalition working for decades, but though people often say they want politicians to work more closely together and fight less, they seem rather less keen on it when it actually happens and one of the teams isn’t to their liking.

But to pin any major party down to one political philosophy is a fool’s errand, and there’s simply no evidence that promoting it more in leaflets and in the “air war” will gain us either votes or many new core supporters.

Instead, we should look at two areas to improve.

Firstly, a distinctive approach to how we do politics and what we do in politics.  What does make us different as Lib Dems?  When Liverpool Councillor Erica Kemp wrote about being a “Cabinet member for your ward” and the LGA Lib Dem group produced a blueprint for an updated Community Politics, how many people read them, discussed them and took them on board?

We might also look at why so many councils have come into Lib Dem control and then left it again.  Certainly, some have been down to national issues, but not all.  What are we getting wrong and how can we get it right?

Secondly, an acceptance that the Lib Dems is a broad church that can and should perfectly happily encompass, for example, both Social Liberals and Orange Bookers without each side demanding that the other aren’t “proper” liberals and should be drummed out of the party.   Even if it were possible (and it isn’t), there’s simply no need to have one Lib Dem philosophy everyone buys into and push that to the electorate.

It’s entirely right for each of those groups to be speaking to those members of the electorate with an interest and persuading them that the Lib Dems is the party for them; and for there to be a robust ongoing debate within the party over which approach is best on particular policy issues.

EARS has done sterling service for the party over the years. I first used the DOS version of the software in the mid-nineties, when it had already been around for a few years. Younger readers may not have encountered the joys of the paper “Shuttleworths” that were used before EARS: sheet after sheet of knock-up lists, laboriously hand-written onto carbon-copy paper, with names crossed out as numbers came in from the polling stations.

EARS has moved on and is a valuable campaigning tool all-year-round. But, as Mark noted, the other parties have not only caught us up but also overtaken us on the IT front. The Federal Party decided it was time to look at the options, and concluded that VAN was the best option.

I had the chance yesterday to get a good look at the new software, and it’s certainly a step forward. As someone who spends a significant portion of my time using EARS as a campaigning tool, VAN seems to me to be a good choice.

On the functionality side, it does pretty much everything that EARS does and a lot more besides, plus it’s pretty simple to pick it up. It’s web-based software (what isn’t these days) so no more fiddling about with the one master copy – log in anywhere, any operating system – you just need a browser and an internet connection (we’re assured it will work over slow dial-up connections; and if you lose Internet connectivity on polling day, just find another computer).

For example, all political parties send letters and emails to groups of voters. With EARS we can create a filter to select the group, and then create a list of addresses or emails to feed into something like Word or Outlook. In VAN we can create the emails and letters within the software – and it then records exactly what’s been sent to each voter. I can go back in two years time and see every letter and email we’ve sent to a particular person.

The VAN equivalent of defining delivery walks is simpler too – click on a Google map to select the area of the walk.

There’s a great deal more as well, of course.

But, as with all good technology, the real question is not what the software does, but what it allows us to do. Will VAN help us win elections?

I think it will, and the trick will be to figure out what it allows us to do differently.

Take polling day. With VAN, polling numbers can be entered directly onto the software from an iPhone (or from any web browser), so less need to spend time driving around. Knock-up lists can be printed off from anywhere too. That gives us the ability, should we wish to do it, to radically change the way we organise polling days, allowing us to spend more time contacting voters and less time on data entry and driving around.

All being well, the party will have migrated from EARS to VAN in ample time to use the new software in the 2012 local elections, which will mean taking the existing data local parties have stored on EARS and importing it into VAN. That’s likely to be the biggest challenge – moving data between the old and new systems – but the plan is to do it centrally so local party officers won’t need to get too bogged down in the technical details.

Like any new software, there’ll be issues, problems and a learning curve but it certainly looks promising so far.

But is it right?

No ideology is completely correct – all have faults where they fail to capture certain facets and nuances of our complex human behaviour. Few are complete nonsense either – most ideologies have elements that capture something important, and it’s a foolish person indeed who dismisses any ideology completely.

Some are better than others, though.

Community Politics seeks to find the form of political organisation that best releases the unique potential of each individual, and in its original formulation comes up with the solution of neighbourhood governance.

As Greaves and Lishman made clear back in 1980, central to Community Politics is direct, small scale decision making taken not by elected representatives, but by every individual community member.

Community politics is quite incompatible with the centralisation of power at the level of the nation-state. Indeed, it is incompatible with the concentration of power at any level.

The most conspicuous and serious absence in Britain is of any structure of neighbourhood government. This is the level that most directly affects the everyday lives of every-one and it is the level of government in which everyone can take part directly. It is only in small, geographically coherent neighbourhoods that everyone can take a direct part in the making of decisions and the exercise of power. At any level above this, some form of indirect democracy involving representative government is needed.

Exercising of power at this level, they argue, must be backed by strong human rights to avoid a tyranny of the majority or simple human rights abuses, and should be outward looking and internationalist.

There’s no suggestion that higher levels of government should cease to exist. Not only local and national but also regional, continental and world governments are advocated. But they would be subservient to the thousands of neighbourhoods, run directly by the members of the community.

There are some important liberal ideas in this early version of Community Politics, but there are problems too.

Should we all be political?
It seems to me to espouse a politics-centric view of life: that we should all be active in politics if we’re to achieve our potential as human beings. But why should that be the case? Can’t someone achieve their full potential with only a passing interest in politics – if that?

What of the dedicated musician, novelist, painter or, for that matter, accountant, builder or stay-at-home mother? Under a representative political system, all those people need only cast their vote once in a while to have their views represented, if that’s the level of involvement they prefer to have. In a Community Politics nirvana, their choice is tougher. Must they sit through interminable community meetings in which they have little interest in order to have any voice at all? As everyone who spends time knocking on doorsteps knows all too well, there is a large proportion of the public who much prefer to have others do the politics.

Who shout’s the loudest?
There’s a conundrum in genuinely empowering us all, whether or not we’ve been elected. It can be a wonderfully effective way to revitalise communities and enhance people’s lives, but the other side of the coin is the way it risks giving the most power to the people with the time, ability and desire to take it (yes, democratic politics does this too, but at least the ballot box acts as a check). That can be good in some ways, but it can result in a situation where others have significantly less power than in a representative democracy.

Human Rights laws might stop neighbourhoods from victimising blacks, gays or women but it can’t prevent those self-appointed people who shout the loudest from wielding the most power.

As before, there is a balance to be struck and I’m not convinced the 1980 incarnation of Community Politics finds it.

Benefits of centralisation
There is a constant – and healthy – tension in government between the benefits of centralisation and those of decentralisation. Each has benefits, and any ideology which paints one as all bad and the other all good must be suspect. The challenge is to get the balance roughly correct.

Centralisation allows for greater uniformity. That has disadvantages, to be sure, but there’s no getting away from the fact that a lot of people – probably a majority – rather like it. McDonalds built a global business empire on it and governments that stray too far from it and allow too many “postcode lotteries” to creep in don’t generally win the undying love of the voting public. Claiming that a reasonable level of uniformity is always a bad thing simply won’t wash.

Centralisation also allows for more coherent planning. Would Transport for London be as effective if it was “Transport for SW19 4JP” which offered a different service to “Transport for SW19 4JG”? Certainly smaller units can choose to work together to pool resources, but the more units you have, the greater the likelihood of that breaking down.

More centralised government can also deliver economies of scale, through everything from avoiding duplication of bureaucracies to increased buying power. Again, it’s possible for decentralised units to work together to achieve similar results, but the more units there are, the tougher it is and the greater the overheads.

Neighbourhood-based welfare?
The Community Politics approach to social care and welfare is particularly interesting, with the views of Greaves and Lishman bearing more than a passing resemblance to Cameron’s big society.

We believe that it is possible to base a strategy for social welfare on the community politics approach. The emphasis will be on self-help and mutual aid, on the sharing of skills and knowledge amongst those who provide care in the community. The role of professionals will be much more in the prevention of problems, in support for carers in the family and the community, and in the stimulation of community responsibility and care…

Trying to imagine a UK converted to this form of Community Politics, I can see many advantages over our traditional ways of doing politics, but no shortage of downsides too.

More recent pieces including Community Politics in the 21st Century – published just last year – seem to tacitly acknowledge many of these limitations and detail something significantly different, but that’s an article for another day.

As the Liberal Democrats move forwards as a party of Government we are building on the positives of Community Politics, but we ignore the problems at our peril.

As the BBC reports, a surprise 3.3% contraction in the construction industry has worried analysts, whilst the strongest growth came from manufacturing.

Average new graduate salaries remain rooted at £25,000  and there’s clearly some way to go before the graduate jobs market fully recovers (though £25 is a figure the typical parliamentary researcher can only gaze at longingly).

As the job prospects for graduates improve, Lib Dem ministers will be keen to promote some of the positive aspects of the tuition fees reforms that have been largely lost in the debate so far, such as poorer students getting more help to go through university, all graduates paying back less each year (and so having over £500 more in their pockets each year in the early years), the lowest paid 25% of graduates paying back less overall under the new system than the old and – for the first time – support for the 40% of students who study full time.

Ministers will be hoping that the combination of a stronger jobs market and a better deal for poorer students, and less well paid graduates, encourages a wider range of students to take up university courses.

An incentive scheme that rewards 16- to 18-year-olds for staying in education post-16 will be abolished when the leaving age is increased to 18.

The Secretary of State for Education said last week that education maintenance allowances (EMAs) would no longer be necessary when the age is raised in 2015.

Giving evidence to the Education and Skills Select Committee inquiry into 14-19 education, Alan Johnson said: “The EMA is there as an incentive to stay on. We will not need to incentivise after 2015.”

It’s notable not only that Labour have conveniently forgotten their plans from Government, but also that the Labour Government did not see the EMA as the best way to help poor students through their post-16 studies.

Recorded crime shows falls across the board, with the exception of sexual offences which are up slightly.   As ever, changes in recorded crime can be affected by changes in definitions, by the way the police do the recording or by the willingness of victims to come forward, but there are no major shift in any of those which would lead us to think it isn’t a real change.  (In some previous years there have been quite significant changes, some of which have made crime look higher than it really was).

The British Crime Survey [pdf] – which asks a large sample of people the same questions every year about their own personal experiences of crime – can  be a better guide to the trends, and that too shows a small but significant drop in crime from 2009 to 2010.  The BCS found household crime to be up 16%, but otherwise crime is down.

So good news all round.

But we still don’t really know why.

Clearly good policing makes a difference.  A lot of crime is committed by a small number of prolific criminals, and stopping them has a big effect on the figures.  Local authorities also work closely with the police and, when it’s done well, help the police focus on the issues local people really care about.

Our prison population in the UK is higher than ever, so some argue that crime is down because more criminals are behind bars.

But the challenge – to explain why levels of crime right across the western world rose through the 1980s, peaked in the early to mid 1990s and have been falling since  – has not yet been met.  In the UK crime rose sharply under Thatcher’s government (which didn’t tend towards an overly liberal approach to criminals).  It peaked in 1995, fell sharply from then until the late ’90s and more gently since.

It doesn’t seem to correlate to economic cycles, prison populations, police investment or any other obvious factor.

Steven D Levitt famously argued in Freakonomics that abortion laws should take the credit – that following changes in the law many of the people who would have gone on to be criminals were aborted.  That theory doesn’t seem to stand up to close scrutiny either.

Any fall in crime is good news and, despite what we might think from reading certain newspapers, we’re all much safer today than we were in 1995.  The way the police are more willing to focus on the issues that really matter to people – anti-social behaviour in particular – even if they aren’t quite the “proper crimes” the coppers might prefer to be dealing with – is an excellent development (and, to plug my own neck of the woods, one the police in Stockport have been taking up for some time).

So we should welcome the good news and continue to work to reduce crime and the fear of crime, but perhaps we need a little circumspection when it comes to making grand pronouncements about exactly why we are where we are now, or what will lead to the positive trend continuing in future years.

I know which animal I’d rather have in the desert, but is the saying true?

The four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible suggests the truth might be a little more complex. The King James, which spawned many turns of phrase we still use today such as “salt of the earth ” and “skin of the teeth” came about as a result of a political compromise and was created by a committee.

The compromise was a challenging one – the need to find something to bring together the Bishops and the Protestants (as they were insultingly called by their opponents) at the beginning of the 17th century. A new translation of the Bible wasn’t anyone’s first choice, but proved to be something that agreement could be achieved on.

The committee – actually a series of committees – created one of the greatest works of English literature ever conceived.

So spare a thought for the poor old committee – perhaps they aren’t so terrible after all.

The Lib Dems have a narrative – a story – about the economy, but it’s not being heard by enough of the people the party needs to win back. One reason is that the story has a beginning and a middle but lacks a proper ending.

The three main parties all have their economic stories for voters.

The beginning of each is a tale of financial woe. In Labour’s version (at least until now) the economic problems are down to the bankers and the international recession. The Lib Dems and Conservatives additionally suggest the then-Labour Government wasn’t wholly blameless.

At the moment, it’s the middle of those stories that’s defining the public mood – the cuts. Cutting public sector employment back to 2002 levels, deep cuts to public spending to take it back to 2006 levels.

The middle of the Labour story – “wrong cuts, wrong time” is clearly finding resonance with many voters, willing not to ask what the right cuts and the right time might be and concerned about the effects of such big public spending reductions.

The middle of the Conservative story is also holding up well with the majority of Tory voters.

The problem for the Lib Dems is the middle of our story is a lot of pain and not enough gain which, as the opinion polls make clear, is not going down well with many of the people who voted Lib Dem in May.

But what of the end of the story – of where all this is taking us? The Lib Dems are making the cuts for a reason and it’s not that hard to find, but we’ve not yet made it part of the story and got it across to voters.

The aim, as we reach the next election, is to have successfully rebalanced employment between the public and private sectors, with many more people in work overall than there are today. Because the deficit will be low or zero, the extra tax receipts coming in as the economy grows can be used to invest in public services and start paying off the national debt, reducing the massive interest payments we’ve been left with (£120 million a day and rising).

That ending can be contrasted with Labour’s approach.

Labour want to cut the deficit more slowly, meaning hundreds of billions more piling onto the national debt than under the Coalition plans. All that extra debt has to be serviced. If we were to go down Labour’s route, we would be left paying tens of millions more in interest than under the Coalition every day – money that would then not be available for schools, hospitals and all the other things Lib Dems want to invest in. Labour’s plan reduces the pain a little today, but increases it a lot down the road.

Back in September 2009, Nick Clegg was telling his party conference – and the country – of the need for “savage cuts” in public spending to sort out the expanding deficit and rein-in the national debt. At the General Election the Lib Dems identified more cuts than either of the other two parties.

That talk in Opposition was followed through by action in Government. Whereas Labour ducked the tough decisions and prevaricated, the Lib Dems have taken them.

But we need to complete our story – our narrative and vision – of where this is all going.

We need to tell people what each path means for their and their children’s lives and find a simple way to get our message across as to why the Lib Dem story has a much happier ending than the one being pushed by Labour.

But what about all those horrible compromises we’re having to make? What about the compromise on tuition fees and many other areas? What about the 35% of the Lib Dem manifesto that’s not in the Coalition Agreement? How can we live with those nasty Tories in so many ministerial positions?

There are those who see compromise as at best a necessary evil and at worst a step too far. In compromising, our critics argue, the Lib Dems have sold out our principles.

Nonsense.

Compromise isn’t a necessary evil of politics, it’s at the very core of what’s good about politics.

There are millions of different people out there with their own opinions on what’s wrong with our country, what’s right with it, what we should be doing. They’re never going to all agree, and nor should they.

So we have politics, because the alternative is a big punch-up.

Politics isn’t religion. It isn’t about finding the one true path and following it come what may. It’s about finding a way for all those people to rub along.

Political parties are compromises. Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, had to allow his Government to do certain things he strongly disagreed with to keep the coalition that is the Labour Party together. Of course he did. Obama’s first year as US President was full of compromises despite his own Democrats having control of Congress.

And the really critical point is that this is no bad thing.

Sure, I have my views on what the country should do. Views which, taken as a whole package, the vast majority of people in the Lib Dems, never mind the whole country, would doubtless not agree with one hundred percent. On some of them history will prove me right, some wrong and on many history will no doubt remain defiantly clueless.

But would it really be better for the country if my opinions, or yours, or Nick Clegg’s, or Ed Miliband’s, or David Cameron’s, or Nick Griffin’s, were the one set of opinions that alone drove policy. Would our world really be a better place without compromise?

Different people – and different groups of people – reaching accommodations which they might not all agree with but can at least live with is what it’s all about, whether you want to improve your town or village, drive forward policies for a country or deliver diplomatic solutions as an alternative to wars across the world.

Of course there is such a thing as a compromise too far – when the deal you get is so poor that it wasn’t worth doing.

Is that where the Lib Dems have found ourselves?

We gained the support of 23% of the public in May, and are seeing nearly two thirds of our manifesto put into practice, including all four of our key election pledges. We’re delivering on our stated aim of sorting out the economic mess the country was in – and for all their objecting to every single cut, we know Labour planned their own but haven’t given a single clue as to what their cuts would be.

The main political parties are overlapping broad churches and always have been. Centre parties around the world tend to gather fewer votes that their opponents on the moderate right and left, and have to take their chances where they arise.

The Lib Dems have done that, and the result in my view is a country a great deal better off than if either Labour or the Conservatives had been left to rule alone.

The MEN reveals how:

* Senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards because of fears about the level of demand
* UK and overseas border guards refused to recognise the cards – with one traveller chased through an Italian airport after trying to use one as ID
* The Home Office discovered the cards could stop some credit cards from working properly

Generally speaking (and there are exceptions) people aren’t stupid, and especially when a problem crops up time and again in different organisations, it’s worth asking the question of whether it’s perhaps a little more complicated than that.

Let’s take a look at one of today’s big stories – the plight of travellers trapped at Heathrow Airport, sleeping on the floor like, we’re told, some sort of refugee camp (the sort of refugee camp with Starbucks and duty free).

The complaint is that people aren’t being told anything. Not enough information – they’re being left in the dark.

The first thing to say is that it’s a perfectly sensible complaint. Not receiving information raises stress and leaves people feeling less in control, more frustrated and angrier. And it’s not as if Heathrow doesn’t have mechanisms to communicate with passengers.

On top of that, it’s hardly a new problem. Remember the Eurostar problems last year? Why can’t they learn, we reasonably ask.

But look at it from the other side. Providing information is fine when it’s predictable and reasonably accurate, but these situations are uncertain. No-one knows when the next flights will be leaving Heathrow. The airport and airlines will be trying different things to sort out the problems, but with so many variables and unknowns, giving an estimate on when the flights will be leaving will often be guesswork.

So what information could be provided?

A running commentary on what the problems are and what’s being done could be provided, and that might not be a bad idea. One problem is that it would raise false expectations, as some plans inevitably didn’t come off or other problems cropped up. Plus gathering that information and passing it on takes extra time and resources, which might result in longer delays. Honest information might say “We’re doing this and we’re hoping to have a plane ready to fly in an hour”, followed by an update 30 minutes later “It isn’t working, at least six hours to the next flight”.

If your aim is to make people feel informed and less stressed, lying to them is probably the most successful strategy – carefully managing a stream of information that may or may not relate to reality but gives the impression of clear and steady progress being made towards an achievable goal. But we’re not too keen on being lied to, and it would only work so many times.

Or minimal information could be provided as is the case now.

My point here is not that the lack of information being provided is necessarily the best option – I don’t know whether it is or not.

This is a wider point about difficult problems.

They’re generally not difficult to spot, and – if we want to solve them – they need more serious examination and perhaps fewer knee-jerk responses.

My personal view on the Lib Dem tuition fees position is one I’ve previously written about.  With hindsight, the pledge was clearly a mistake and our MPs shouldn’t have made it.  However, we are where we are and MPs have to consider not just the pledge but actually doing what’s best for students.

There’s a very strong argument that Lib Dem MPs in Government are letting students down if they keep the pledge.  As it is, they’re able to engage with the Conservatives and negotiate the best deal for students (and what’s being proposed, whilst far from perfect, isn’t nearly as terrible as the NUS would like you to think – poorer students will get more help to go to university and poorer graduates will pay less that they do now).

So, onto that day.

We didn’t know what to expect.  Would hundreds turn up, or just a handful?  Should we hide the fire extinguishers?

The police told us this morning that around 14 people were expected.  They’d spend the morning knocking on doors around the area, then have a protest with a banner and come to the office to present a petition and some pledges.  The MP was keen to meet the protestors and was able to re-organise his diary.

As the road outside the office is a busy one with a narrow pavement, the police weren’t too keen on the protestors gathering there, so a space was found for them to set up nearby to protest and get publicity shots, and a time agreed for two to come.

Thank you to the police.  From our side, they looked to be doing what they could to get the balance right between permitting the protestors to do their thing and get their publicity without compromising public safety (I did speak to the protestors about their dealings with the police and, if they had complaints, they didn’t mention them to me).

In the event, I saw six protestors – all of whom I spoke to and all of whom were very pleasant, with not the slightest hint of trouble.  I don’t know if any were from the constituency.  The MP spent well over half an hour in discussion with two protestors.  It’s safe to say there were disagreements, though interesting that the protestors didn’t want to offer any alternative to tuition fees – they simply wanted him to keep his pledge and said it was up to MPs to come up with another solution.

Part of being in power – at local or national level – is making the difficult decisions.  Many will be between the option you don’t like and the option you think is even worse, and there’d be something very odd with the world if at least some people didn’t think you’d got it wrong (and sometimes you will get it wrong – so listening to your critics isn’t a bad idea, even if you don’t normally end up doing exactly what they want).

I’m sure this won’t be the last protest against the Coalition, and quite right too – every government has its detractors and they’ve every right to peacefully make their case.

On this occasion I disagree with the protestors.  For the Lib Dem MPs, making the pledge was a mistake, but I think going into negotiations with your hands tied because you’d already committed yourselves to keeping it would also be an error.  By focusing on the pledge and not engaging in what the Coalition should be doing, the protestors may succeed in scoring political points and harming the Lib Dems, but they aren’t acting in the best interests of the students of today and tomorrow.

They’re wrong.

The Liberal Democrats have made a u-turn on tuition fees – they haven’t denied it. As I argued a few days ago, the Lib Dems have no claim to be morally superior to any other party. We didn’t want to go back on commitments and promises but, like Labour and the Conservatives, we have done.

But is that u-turn a betrayal of students?

Or, to put it another way, is the result of that u-turn that students get a worse deal than they’d otherwise have got? What would student funding look like if the Lib Dems had kept their pledge?

Let’s look at what the NUS want (presumably they would be welcoming the Lib Dems as saviours had this been delivered).

The NUS favour a graduate tax. The NUS idea is that students don’t pay to go to university, but pay more tax than non-graduates after they leave and get a job. They think they’ve solved the problems with a graduate tax (the ones that saw first Labour and more recently the Lib Dems decide it really wasn’t workable), and perhaps they have.

Key is that the tax stops after you’ve been paying it for a certain time (they suggest 25 years) or after you’ve paid back a certain amount. Under the graduate tax, those who go on to earn low incomes would pay less than today, whilst the high earners would end up paying more.

So that’s the good solution. Now let’s take a look at evil tuition fees.

Under tuition fees, students don’t pay to go to university, but pay extra after they leave and get a job – nothing on the first £21,000, then 9p in the pound thereafter (this may be tweaked to further reduce the repayments of people on lower incomes).

Key is that the payments stop after you’ve been paying it for a certain time (the Coalition propose 30 years) or after you’ve paid back a certain amount. Under the Coalition proposals, those who go on to earn low incomes would pay less than today, whilst the high earners would end up paying more.

Sound oddly similar, don’t they?

There are differences between the two proposals – each has pros and cons (for example, the Coalition has proposed supporting part-time students and has an increased bursary system to support students from poorer backgrounds through university; whilst the NUS oppose different universities being able to charge different amounts and don’t like the idea of a market in universities or courses).

The NUS argument that these differences justify their claim of the Lib Dems betraying students is, frankly, feeble.

What if the Lib Dems had kept their pledge and had just opposed higher fees rather than engaging with the Conservatives to get a better deal for students? Indulging in what-if scenarios is always a risky business, but I think it’s a reasonably fair bet that the end result would have been something the NUS liked even less. Uncapped fees. Less support for students from poorer backgrounds. A less progressive repayment plan.

Lib Dems who want to see all student tuition funded from general taxation may have more reason to be concerned that the policy is moving in the wrong direction – the Lib Dems have 57 MPs and a clear majority at the General Election voted for parties who favour students paying more, so that was always going to be a tough one to carry off. But for the NUS to shout betrayal over relatively minor policy differences does them little credit.

I don’t think the Lib Dems have handled the issue well. As Clegg has admitted, with the benefit of hindsight it would have been better not to have made the pledge in the first place. The Coalition has also allowed Labour to get away with the headline claim of fees tripling, giving the entirely false impression that all students will be paying three times more than they are now. I’ve no doubt lessons will be learnt.

But the idea that the Lib Dems have betrayed students, when they’ve actually delivered a policy amazingly close to what the NUS is campaigning for, should be treated with the distain it deserves.

Lib Dem politicians have certainly fallen into the trap from time to time, but they’re not alone: every party has its moments (with many Labour people being particularly convinced of their moral superiority at the moment, if some of the comments on this site are anything to go by).

It’s easy to see how people genuinely come to believe it’s true. As I noted a few days ago, we’ve a natural tendency to put a positive gloss on the activities of our party and see those of the other parties in a more negative light.

It’s much easier to claim the moral high ground when you’re in opposition too – as the Lib Dems have known for years and Labour have rediscovered (the Tea Party movement have had a similar pleasure in the US).

But what would it mean for a party to be genuinely more moral and honest – whether in power or opposition; whether winning or losing – than its opponents?

Parties are collections of individuals – people who’ve joined up for all sorts of reasons (if the party is any decent size at all). Some want power because they enjoy it, others because they’ve an agenda to drive. Some want to help their community, or enjoy politics, or any combination of these and a hundred others.

And politicians are people – not particularly better or worse than any others – and people can be a dodgy bunch. We humans tell lots of lies (society wouldn’t work otherwise), we cheat, we play political games in our homes and work. Surprise, surprise, people in political parties are no different.

So for one party to morally superior to another would require that party to somehow attract more moral members and activists overall. Sorry guys – I know we all like to think our activists are a more morally upstanding bunch than the opposition, but- when the rose-tinted spectacles are removed – I really don’t believe it’s true and I’ve certainly not seen any evidence for it.

OK, scratch the moral superiority argument – why vote for one party over another?

Perhaps because you support that party’s policies. When in power, all parties are reasonably good at putting their policies into practice. Needless to say, you can achieve more if you have an outright majority and, by definition, not quite so much as a coalition partner, but that’s down largely to the voters.

There are of course many other reasons people vote for one candidate over another – such is the joy of democracy.

So, whether you’re a supporter of the Tea Party movement in the US, the Lib Dems, Labour, the Greens, the Conservatives or any other party, if you expect your party to gain power and then buck the trend of every political party in history and meet some wonderfully high moral ideal, be prepared for disappointment.

Political parties are full of humans, and humans have a nasty habit of being less than perfect (great guy Gandhi – probably best not to mention his support for apartheid, or the way he treated his wife and children).

That’s not to say there aren’t differences between individuals.  Some people are more moral than others (whatever your moral code might be).  But taken as a whole, and faced with the realities of being – and staying – in power, those differences cancel out across a party.

Setting your party up as morally superior to the next one is rarely sustainable.

As Jim Pickard at the FT reports:

In case you thought the IDS scheme was familiar – forcing people to do 4 week’s labour for their benefits – that is because it already exists. Since last October anyone out of work and claiming jobseekers’ allowance for over a year (in most parts of the country) has to take part in Flexible New Deal.

And part of the Flexible New Deal is … doing four weeks work experience.

Here’s how the BBC reported the launch of Labour’s plan back in July 2008*

Unemployed people will be forced to work for their benefits, as part of welfare reforms unveiled by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell.

He told MPs that from now on, the longer people claimed, the more the state would expect in return.

The Welfare Green Paper includes plans to scrap Incapacity Benefit and make those jobless for more than two years work full-time in the community.

This raises interesting dilemmas for those on all sides of the debate – and perhaps a question for the media.  Why is it that IDS floating the plan rates front pages and angry comments in newspapers like the Observer, whilst Labour actually doing something remarkably similar was barely worth a mention?

* Thanks to Rob Stickland for bringing the BBC article to my attention.

According to a YouGov poll a few days ago, those who say they’ll vote for the traditionally internationalist and pro-European Lib Dems are clearly in favour (58-36) but – what’s this?

Even more in favour are Conservative voters, by nearly two to one (it’s 61-34 with 5% don’t knows).

I wrote a few days ago that whether we approve of a policy has far more than we’d like to admit to do with whether it comes from the party or faction we support.

I wonder how many Conservative voters would have been in favour of this plan to share our military sovereignty with the French if it had come from Labour.  And whether more Labour voters would have favoured it.

The poll conducted by YouGov on 2nd-3rd November 2010 found 48% of all voters favoured the plan, with 40% against.  Conservative voters were 61-34 in favour, Lib Dem voters 58-36 in favour and Labour voters 47-44 in favour.

He no right of appeal against the judges’ decision, but wants to take it to judicial review, though on what grounds isn’t clear.

Mr Woolas would like us to think that the judgement is not only wrong but fundamentally damaging to political discourse – that it will allow politicians to get away with all sorts whilst their opponents cower, unwilling to risk a court case from challenging them.

That didn’t happen after the last case in 1911 and there’s no reason to think it will happen now.

Mr Woolas, in a statement issued via his solicitor, said

Those who stand for election can participate in the democratic process must be prepared to have their political conduct and motives subjected to searching, scrutiny and inquiry.

They must accept that their political character and conduct will be attacked.

It is vital to our democracy that those who make statements about the political character and conduct of election candidates are not deterred from speaking freely for fear that they may be found in breach of election laws.

Let’s look at the bar that has to be cleared for someone to be found guilty under this legislation.

• To fall under this law, a statement must be about the personal conduct or character of a candidate – it excludes attacks on a party or on purely public conduct (for example, the candidate’s political views or actions).
• It’s not enough to show the statements were false.  It must also be shown that the respondent (Woolas in this case) knew them to be false at the time they were made.
• Although this is a civil case, the burden falls on the  Petitioner (in this instance, Elwyn Watkins) to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.  Proving to that level that Woolas knew his claims to be false at the time they were made was no easy matter.

Woolas’ argument would appear to be that making attacks on the personal character or conduct of your opponent which are not only untrue but which you know to be untrue is all part of acceptable political campaigning, and there’s nothing wrong with winning an election on that basis; indeed that it’s “vital to our democracy“. that someone is able to win an election in that way.

Certainly some of Mr Woolas’ opponents believe these sorts of tactics have been vital to his success not just in 2010 but  in at least one previous election too.

The full and summary judgements can be read here.