The last edition of ALDC’s Campaigner before the start of the election contained this piece from me:
Knowing why people vote the way they do is tough. It’s not just because people may be reluctant to be honest to others about their motivations, but people are also often bad at understanding themselves.
In fact, one of the findings increasingly coming out from research into how we make decisions is that often we make a decision using our subconscious and only afterwards come up with a justification for it. Our subconscious decides, our conscious rationalises.
It is an intriguing – and in some ways, scary – finding that is best illustrated by a clever experiment where people were shown two photographs of similar, but different, people. They were asked to pick which one they thought was the most attractive. They were then given that photograph and asked to explain the reason for their decision.
I think Nick is right – we need change” Gordon Brown to Andrew Marr (18th April 2010)
Gordon Brown keeps agreeing with Nick Clegg but he doesn’t seem to understand where this agreement is leading. It leads directly to the following question, for the man who now admits he has had one damascene experience after another: “How can you or your party be the change we need?”
Gordon Brown has long had trouble reading the runes (and much else besides). He says he has been appalled by dishonest dealing in the City. He admits that he personally should have done better in …
I’ve just had the following article published in the “Rhode Island Provident” of all places:
You would be forgiven for having been taken by surprise by the revolution in Kyrgyzstan. A few Scrabble enthusiasts may have been rubbing their hands at the news that (now that Mattel are allowing the use of proper nouns) the tiny mountainous nation in Central Asia will earn you 80 points for just one vowel – more if you can snag a triple word score tile. However, for the most part Kyrgyzstan has been unnoticed by the rest of the world.
I was really pleased to hear Nick Clegg raise the issue of Trident and the treatment of our troops during the first TV debate. For too long, the defence debate has been dominated by the Tories, claiming to be the only party who understands defence, and Labour who are happy to use troops but aren’t interested in where they live, how much they’re paid or what happens to them when they get home.
Successive defence reviews in the 1990s tore the heart out of the military without really addressing the key issue of what armed forces are used for …
How many times are we reminded and told the Liberal Democrats can’t and won’t win, or that a Liberal Democrat vote is a wasted vote? Too many times, I suggest.
It’s a message that was suggested glibly by none other than John Humphreys on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme earlier this week, in a blatantly unfair remark. Too often the BBC, which is supposed to be impartial, allows commentators to deride and discount the Lib Dems as somehow irrelevant compared to the other two major parties.
It really is time to challenge such comments, and, in the aftermath of Nick …
I almost had an article published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website on Wednesday, marking the launch of the Lib Dem manifesto. For convoluted reasons it never saw the light of web – but most of it stands the test of time. Except perhaps the line suggesting the party could never hope for Nick Clegg to be as well liked as his predecessor: that’s the power of television for you.
Quite rightly, many wise (and not necessarily old) heads have been counselling caution following the last 24 hours explosively positive headlines for the Lib Dems. The party has enjoyed polling …
I nearly wrote this a few weeks ago, at which point it would have looked prophetic – writing it now just looks like I’m crowbarring it on the back of the rather sensational Yougov / Sun poll, news of which is breaking on Twitter.
Any number of people have taken the poll figures, Con: 33 (-4); Lab: 28 (-3); Lib Dem: 30 (+8), plugged them into UK Polling Report’s uniform swing calculator, and reeled, aghast at the revelation that our awful electoral system is so completely bust that it’s conceivable that the party …
Now the dust is starting to settle after the first debate, who are the winners and losers – aside from the party leaders?
Winner – liberalism
Loser – hostility to foreigners
Praising some aspects of immigration, talking about no like-for-like replacement of Trident, pledging to scrap tuition fees, promising to cut taxes for most by raising taxes for the very rich – Nick Clegg won the debate not by abandoning policies for some mushy middle ground, but by sticking to core liberal beliefs. Those beliefs were carefully wrapped in language and arguments designed to be appeal to a wide audience – but …
During the big debate, David Cameron slipped up when pushed by Nick Clegg on the Trident nuclear missile fleet.
I will keep our independent nuclear defence system, said Cameron – forgetting for a moment that Trident is a dual-key with the Americans, it can’t ever be fired without their agreement, and we are totally beholden to them, despite spending the money with them in the first place. But Cameron added:
Are we really happy to say that we’d give up our independent nuclear deterrent when we don’t know what is going to happen with Iran, we can’t be certain of the
I cannot tell you how good it is to be able to type the words, “Nick Clegg was the clear winner”, and know that not only is it my view, but that it’s the public view, too. We’ve already published the two poll results which matter: those showed Nick was judged to have done best by 51%, with Cameron on 29% and Brown on 19% (YouGov), and Nick 46%, Cameron 26%, Brown 20% (ComRes).
Nick Clegg … it’s true, Nick had a couple of advantages going into the debate. He’s the least known, so merely being given equal status is already a win. True, too, expectations were lower for Nick. But even allowing for that, this was an important night for Nick. Those of us who have watched Nick at his town hall meetings will have been familiar enough with the style: natural, conversational, honest, open, personable. Though all were nervous, at least initially, Nick appeared to shrug off the jitters most quickly. His body language, crucial in a debate like this, was engaging, both with the audience in the studio, and the audience at home. What people saw tonight was the Real Nick Clegg. They seem to like him.
Gordon Brown … the Prime Minister started with low expectations, but for a different reason than Nick: most people have already made up their minds that he’s not up to the job. I was relatively (and I stress the word relatively) impressed with Brown’s performance.
Ever since Nick Clegg launched his line on a hung Parliament – that he would talk to the party that won the “strongest mandate” and was keeping all options open – the question has been asked (though not by the public): does that mean the party with most votes or the party with most seats?
And ever since Nick has been asked that question, he has studiously refused to answer it. He stonewalled Paxman on Monday, and at the Lib Dem manifesto launch today.
And you know what? He’s absolutely right to refuse to be drawn. Here’s why: the …
For a long time after David Cameron’s election to leader of the Conservative Party there was widespread talk of “tactical unwind”, that is how his changes to the Conservative Party may result in much less anti-Tory tactical voting at the next general election. It’s one of the range of reasons that many Tories quote for believing that they will do better in terms of seat numbers than the overall vote numbers suggest.
However, what’s struck me for some time is how the overall political campaigning is playing out in a way that is likely to rewind the unwind.
I read with interest your views on the similarities between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. It is with grace that Lib Dems accept your praise for Liberal politicians of the past, from Gladstone to Keynes and Beveridge via Lloyd George – many thanks for the history lesson, much appreciated. In return, most Liberal Democrats have no trouble acknowledging that in your 13 years in power, New Labour has introduced some progressive measures, including legislation on civil partnerships, the Freedom of Information Act and some constitutional and Parliamentary reforms (we shall revisit the …
I’ve been amused to see the rush-to-rubbish Vince Cable today among some right-wing bloggers following his appearance on BBC1’s The Politics Show.
Iain Dale (but of course) was first up to tweet: “Well done Jon Sopel for finally exposing Vince Cable as the overrated flipflopper that he is.” He was soon followed by ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie, and Wall Street Journal’s Iain Martin, who has a pet-obsession with Vince’s popularity.
Having missed the show at lunchtime, I sat down nervously to catch up on iPlayer (Vince’s inteview begins about 3 minutes in) fully expecting him to be eviscerated by Jon Sopel.
In fact, what I watched was a robust interview in which Vince more than held his own, and made the key points that (1) the Labservatives have consistently opposed Lib Dem attempts to clean up our politics, and (2) the Tories need to explain how they’re going to fund their various tax-cuts if not through raising VAT.
Why have the Tories got it in for Vince?
Which left me wondering: what got Iain, Tim and Iain so excited that they dashed into the twitblogosphere to try and swing the media narrative against Vince? (Besides the inevitable election-time partisan point-scoring, that is).
This week, leaders of some of the UK’s biggest businesses came out in support of George Osborne’s plans to reverse Labour’s proposed National Insurance rise. In a letter to the Telegraph, they argue that the reversal, to be funded by an extra £6 billion’s worth of efficiency savings, is needed to protect jobs keep Britain’s economic recovery on track.
38 Degrees has launched a campaign to persuade these business leaders to change their minds. We’re concerned that their outcry might have less to do with concerns about job-losses, and more to do with the effect that the increases in their financial …
Thorne Godinho is a member of the Democratic Alliance, the Lib Dems’ sister party in South Africa.
Since 1997 the United Kingdom has brought in new laws that many fascists would wholeheartedly admire. Civil liberties, individual freedoms, personal autonomy and private property rights are ignored by the Labour-run government – who would rather pursue their idea of a better society, than a free one.
Tony Blair’s dynamic leadership, coupled with the more centrist vision of his party, won New Labour the election in 1997; but 13 years of Labour rule has shown that the former socialist party is still essentially …
Since the World Cup of 1966 there has been a number of occasions for the British to hear the first lines of the former German national anthem: “Deutschland über alles. Über alles in der Welt” (“Germany above all, above all in the world”). Should a new line been added in the wake of the recent Greek crisis, and in the wait for the next one? Then it would go as “German above Europe”.
As the third major country in the EU, with France and Germany, the UK opinion and leaders should pay heed, even if this distracts a bit from home …
It’s not often you’ll find me agreeing with Labour’s uber-spin-doctor, and Tony Blair’s apologist-in-chief, Alastair Campbell. But precisely because he helped write the New Labour election-winning manual, he is highly attuned to the failings in the Conservatives’ attempts to plagiarise it, and in particular David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s habit of mistaking tactics for strategy.
The latest example he highlights on his always-entertaining blog is the Tories’ attempts to force Labour onto the defensive by promising to reverse the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions:
Amongst the plethora of writing on the 2008 US Election, I came across this observation:
“After every debate the media narrative was determined by the first two questions and answers.”
(J. Heilemann & M. Halperin, “Race of A Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House”, Penguin Viking).
I decided to see if that hypothesis holds true for the recent Chancellors’ Debate as a clue as to whether it will apply to our forthcoming Party Leaders’ Debates.
The first question, asked by a trainee solicitor, in the Chancellors’ Debate was,
“This is a job interview; what personal qualities do you have that make you better …
I am a 10 year old girl and I want to offer a child’s perspective of the election. I watched the last Prime Minister’s Question Time and National Insurance tax was the main subject of the debate. In fact, it seems to be the main subject of the election so far.
Is this election between Red and Blue over the effects of the recession on big business? Let me tell you what this election means for a child starting out in life. Big businesses recruit graduates from red brick universities. These universities, in turn, recruit students who are capable of undergoing a tough degree course. These students often come from private schools or the grammar state school systems. Where does the fairness exist?
Elections should be about change and a vote for a better run country on matters such as the NHS, housing, poverty, climate change, help for children, crime, security, personal liberty, terrorism, disability issues, equal rights and globalisation.
George Osborne and David Cameron are given to policy stunts which they should know by now will come back to haunt them. I’ve written about it before on Lib Dem Voice.
And this time they really have messed up big time. Should they win the election they will undoubtedly live to regret their foolishness on National Insurance and, most especially, the public sector savings they have cavalierly claimed can easily pay for it.
The people who know about these things – not company bosses who are quite understandably interested in reducing their company tax bills – have come out against Osborne and Cameron’s electoral cynicism and imprudence.
Skeptical Voter is a non-partisan project aimed at helping UK voters make an informed choice by documenting where each candidate stands on science, secularism and evidence-based policy.
Over the past few months we have been developing the Skeptical Voter wiki, a candidate database that works along similar lines to Wikipedia. Anyone can create or edit an entry, and our volunteers have been busily collating information about the views of incumbent MPs on issues ranging from the abolition of the blasphemy law to climate change science.
The Skeptical Voter wiki is already a rich source of information, with …
The Internet can be a nasty place at times, either with jabbering monomaniacs of Comment is Free threatening to collapse in on themselves and create a pit of nihilistic despair which will consume the Earth long before the Large Hadron Collider ever does; to minor local disputes or questionable professional decisions which flash around the world quicker, and generating more anger than reports of Frankenstein’s monster lurching towards the village.
Secure behind our computer screens, we can descend into an accentuated form of road-rage safe in the knowledge that we do not even have to worry about our opponents …
Gordon Brown has today announced one of his election pledges: Labour has no plans to make our tax system fairer. Or has he put it: Labour will hold the basic income tax rate at 20 pence in the pound.
Lib Dems, too, are committed to keeping the basic rate of income tax at 20p. But, unlike Labour, the party would make a priority of lifting the personal tax allowance to £10,000, ensuring millions of low-earners and pensioners will stop paying taxes altogether.
It’s a question that’s been playing on the minds of Lib Dems for some time: how can the party translate the popularity of the party’s deputy leader and shadow chancellor Vince Cable into votes for the Liberal Democrats?
Of Vince’s popularity there is no doubt. Two recent opinion polls (one for PoliticsHome.com, the other by Ipsos Mori) showed him well in front of his Labour and Tory rivals for the Treasury post, Alastair Darling and George Osborne.
And it’s not just members of the public. Just this week, a group of non-Lib …
For many years the researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have been investigating the relationship between wealth, inequality, and measurements of a good society. The measurements of a good society would be low levels of crime, low levels of teenage pregnancy, good health in terms of long life expectancy, low levels of obesity – and many other measures besides.
During their research they have published books on this, and finally they published the book “The Spirit Level“, which has had the biggest impact of all.
There are many countries that are poor, and clearly they need economic growth in order to …
It’s one of the most famous party election broadcasts of all time – John Cleese’s classic 1987 appeal to the British public to reject the extremism of left and right as represented by ‘Loony Labour’ councils and Mrs Thatcher’s Tories, and opt for the reasonable party of the centre, the SDP/Liberal Alliance.
For those who’ve never had the chance to enjoy it, please scroll to the bottom of this post, and re-live it in all its glory. (And wonder at the fact that party election broadcasts used to be 10 minutes long – yes, that’s right, 20 years ago political parties were foolish enough to believe the public actually had an attention span).
What’s most striking about the Cleese message is the deliberate emphasis on the Alliance as a moderating force in British politics. An honest broker in whom the British people could place their trust to ensure neither Labour nor Tory narrow-mindedness could wreak wilful destruction. Cleese commits the Alliance to breaking up the cosy rules of British politics that have so well suited the Labour/Tory duopoly for so many years.
Breaking the cosy rules of two-party politics
It’s two decades since this broadcast, but the themes are starkly familiar.
For example, there’s the Alliance pledge to halt petty partisan tribalism by agreeing to work with the other parties where we agree with them.
Well, Vince Cable early on called for a ‘government of national unity’ to help the nation through its worst recession in 60 years. More recently, Nick Clegg urged the formation of a cross-party Council of Financial Stability to agree the timetable and scale of deficit reduction.
Example two from the Cleese broadcast: the Lib Dems are the only party not beholden to special interests.
Spool forward two decades, and Labour still is in hock to the unions, desperately reliant on Unite, Unison and the GMB to finance its general election campaign. And does anyone really believe the Tories – the party of non-dom peers and candidates like Lord Ashcroft and Zac Goldsmith – will stand up to their “pinstriped Scargill” friends in the City?
Yet Nick Clegg has pledged to take tough action on those banks which break promises to lend money to businesses and householders, while Vince Cable has made it plain how the Lib Dems would intervene to make unions and businesses sit down and talk. It’s a lot easier to arrive at the correct solution if you’re not worried whether it will affect your party’s cash flow.
Not everything has stayed the same in the last quarter of a century, of course. Both Labour and the Tories have tacked further to the centre (not least because of the desire to pick up those voters who were attracted to the Alliance).
But the fundamental point remains: Labour and the Tories are complacently content for politics to stay the same, to see-saw between red and blue. It’s an argument the Lib Dems have freshened up in the past week, with the launch of the party’s subversive Labservatives campaign, a Web 2.0 successor to the Cleese broadcast.
A moderate square for the radical circle
It’s an interesting campaigning dilemma for the Lib Dems. In many ways, we’re party which has the most radical manifesto: a Lib Dem government would re-cast the taxation system, and re-mould the political system. Yet our natural voter base, and the party’s general disposition, is moderate, incremental, pragmatic.
Is this such a bad thing? Not really. The only way in which you can attract support for a radical manifesto is to win trust that your programme will work and is better. It’s at least in part why the party adopted community politics: prove to people you can fix the drains, repair the roads, run the council … and they might just trust you to run the country, too.
Well, it’s just the same at national level. At this election, the Lib Dems have the opportunity to position ourselves squarely in the centre of the key debate which will determine most people’s votes: the economy.
Don’t trust Labour to target government waste? Don’t trust the Tories to cut public spending wisely? Well, the Lib Dems are the party you can trust – and Vince Cable is the guy you can trust – to act as a moderating influence on the extremist tribal dogma of the other two parties. And by doing so, we can make the argument that only the Lib Dems have the vision to transform politics for the better.
After three years of ifs, buts and maybes since the “election that never was” debacle in 2007, we’re going to be put out of our misery this week.
The phoney war that has been fought out by the political class, to the bemusement of the electorate, is one of the least appealing aspects of our elitist political culture.
With this in mind, I must admit to being pleasantly surprised by responses from candidates to the general election policy comparison web initiative DEMREF 2010, which, for my sins, I have hurriedly got together in recent months.
A relatively inexpensive (£1.1 million) project kicked off in 2007. The idea was for local authorities on each side of the English Channel to work together for mutual benefit in some specific and limited areas.
Identification of the challenges in the Channel area and publication of a document defining the strategic orientations for the horizon 2007 – 2013;
Deployment of tangible initiatives structured around five themes:
* Tourism: creation of a common database on target tourist populations.
* Fishing and fish resources: constitution of a consultative regional council for fishing in the Channel area.
* Integrated coastal
Chloe I remember the long journeys into Manchester with my Mum 50 years ago. Piccadilly gardens were lovely. Looking at them now , if that's anyone's idea of progress...
Jason Connor How about the coastal and other towns left behind due to labour inertia? It's all well and good transforming Greater Manchester if you can call it that, but I h...
Peter Davies Those words at the beginning of the declaration were pretty disingenuous. It was obvious even at the time that they were incompatible with the rest of the decla...
TimL Thanks Alex and Chloe. FWIW I don't think these are resignation honours - I think it is just timing coincidence. Whether Starmer comes back with more resignatio...
Simon McGrath Oh dear. The UK is actually doing quite well for AI firms and investment here - would the state taking over some of the shares make that more or less likely to...
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