The sharp fall in the take-up of the MMR vaccine is a cautionary tale of our times. The World Health Organisation advises that a 95% take-up rate should be targeted for “herd immunity”.

Britain falls well short, largely because the unfounded scare about the safety of the MMR vaccine behind the sharp reduction in take-up, from 92% in 1996 to 80% in 2004 (though there has since been a smaller reversal).

The consequences have been serious.

2006 saw the first death from measles in Britain for 14 years, while there were . And while the mumps epidemic in the UK in 2005 had more to do with children not being immunised before the introduction of MMR in 1988, a loss of confidence and a lack of take-up would make future occurences more likely.

Next week’s Fabian Review health issue seeks to reopen the public debate about how to raise immunisation rates.
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Boris is enjoying a honeymoon as London Mayor, as Andrew Grice of The Independent writes on his politics blog.

Will it last? I fear that Boris Johnson’s critics are already repeating the mistake they made during the campaign, as I argue in a New Statesman column on the Mayoral race fallout.

Gleefully anticipating a gaffe-filled mayoralty that will wreck David Cameron’s project helps Johnson to set expectations very low. Johnson benefits as much as Ronald Reagan or George W Bush ever did from being seriously “misunderestimated”. Which other candidate would have got away with floundering and being roughly £100m out on their sums for buses in the televised mayoral debates?

But if he merely remembers to put his trousers on every morning and get to work, Johnson’s mayoralty will be acclaimed as a triumph. But the real test must be the same any other mayor would face: delivery. That - with Johnson presented as a hands-off “chairman of the board” - is truly a test of the Cameron project”.

Rather than expecting a total fiasco, we should be scrutinising what the Tory modernisers want to do with power.

Perhaps the (conservative) answer will be not very much at all.

There are many very good reasons not to vote for Boris Johnson, but most likely we will wake up on Friday to that result.

The election now comes down to a question of turnout and of appealing to second preferences, particularly of Liberal Democrat voters. The key unknown may be what impact last minute doubts about Johnson have. (Two-thirds of the Politics Home ‘insider panel’ think this will make a difference, but will it be enough?)

As I wrote in a Comment is Free piece on how we have come this close to the prospect of Mayor Boris, the Conservative Party has successfully Boris-proofed Lynton Crosby’s campaign from the candidate, and is now worrying about how to Boris-proof David Cameron’s ambitions to be Prime Minister from the possible fallout of Johnson’s Mayoralty.
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Dear Vince,

As you are a Liberal Democrat with a record of support for progressive causes and who represents a London constituency in Parliament, I am writing to you as we enter the final month of what looks certain to be the closest London Mayoral election campaign that we have seen to date.

Naturally, I know that you will be campaigning and casting your first preference vote for the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. Many people outside the Liberal Democrats will agree that Brian is running a serious and creditable campaign, particularly on the issue of crime.

However, the London elections also give every voter a second preference vote.
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I very much welcome Gordon Brown’s commitment to an inquiry ” to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath” - even aside from the unusual experience of this very welcome political development coming in correspondence between myself and the Prime Minister. (Naturally, one also expects that other Cabinet ministers will take note.

We were very pleased with last week’s budget commitments on child poverty and will be thinking about where else we should now be pressing for progress).
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What on earth is Trevor Phillips up to? Britain’s most prominent black public figure has launched an attack on Barack Obama in this month’s Prospect, reported prominently in The Independent today, accusing the leading Democrat of ‘cynicism’ which will hold back black Americans and hold back the politics of race.

Trevor is entitled to his view, and clearly he is rooting for a Hillary Clinton comeback. But, whatever happens, he ought to acknowledge the Obama achievement and its extraordinary resonance.

The worst part of his argument, especially since he heads the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is his implication that Obama is a less legitimate black leader because he isn’t descended from slaves. What happened to opportunity for all? Trevor Phillips has been controversial because he has challenged and criticized the tendency of multiculturalism to stress differences and create inter-ethnic tensions. Why retreat to the old politics of race, and this discredited question about whether Obama is black enough, when black voters have made it pretty clear what they think?

Phillips doesn’t really present much of an argument for the claim that Obama will set back the cause of post-racial politics. Yes, Obama is a politician. He isn’t the new messiah. He has been out looking for votes, and stirring up hope. But if anybody can think of a less cynical political campaign in the last thirty years, I would be surprised.

We need a shift in the politics of race, as Sunny Hundal and the New Generation Network have argued. The challenge to race leaders is to remember that they should be trying to put themselves out of business. Trevor Phillips has wanted to champion that cause. It would be a great shame if, just as we got there, he decided that to see change, after all, as a threat.

An Obama nomination isn’t inevitable, yet. But Hillary Clinton’s final, best answer in the Texas candidate’s debate last night acknowledged the possibility of defeat. This was an important signal. Clinton will still fight on to win, but now within the limits demanded by partisan loyalty. (But what alternative is there when a desperate bid to go nuclear would almost certainly backfire?).

The insurgent is now the clear frontrunner and Democrats have a final chance to scrutinize the potential vulnerability of an Obama bid: could he really go toe-to-toe with John McCain in November and win? Will Higham of the think-tank Demos dreads an Obama candidacy, articulating the fear that Obama “is a political Icarus who’s just now nearing the beating sun”.

I think there are three big fears about Obama’s General Election resilience. And each threatens to evoke recurring Democrat nightmares from the ghost of elections past.
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It certainly isn’t over. The scale of Obama’s victories last week took a neck-and-neck race into with one where he was the frontrunner. The Obama camp deny this and would prefer to stay the underdog - their last overdog phase lasted just days between Iowa and New Hampshire. But the central question of the Democrat campaign is now, in the face of greater scrutiny, he can close the deal.

And whatever the final result, it is difficult not to conclude that Barack Obama has won the campaign. Hillary Clinton’s core problem is that she finds herself in the campaign which Obama has framed. His simply being there after Super Tuesday destroyed her ‘inevitability’ strategy in terms of strategy, public messages and campaign funding and organisation. Despite some mis-steps under pressure, Obama’s campaign has been impressive in its consistency and relative calm.

Still, Hillary Clinton is not out of this.
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[This article is a prelude to the Fabian Society’s ‘Fabian Review’ new year editorial, published on January 3rd. It was previewed in Sunday’s Observer.]

Whose has been the greatest political fightback of all time? The championship bout of our times would be between John ‘Soapbox’ Major, who won an unwinnable election in 1992, and Bill ‘Comeback Kid’ Clinton, reduced to lame duck status by Newt Gingrich’s revolution just two years into his Presidency.

While Harold Macmillan’s ability to turn the Suez debacle into a Tory landslide has many contemporary parallels, the all-time champion of champions has to be Harry Truman, able to brandish the famous headlines ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ after his surprise Presidential victory sixty years ago.

After Gordon Brown’s Autumn horribilis, it may be little Christmas consolation to think that others have dug themselves out of considerably larger holes than he finds himself in. Labour has been buffeted by events ever since a hubristic party conference.

The result is that the Conservatives are now favourites to win the next general election. That, of course, is the threat to Brown. The fightback strategy he needs depends on realizing how he could yet turn it into his opportunity too.

As I argue in an editorial in the Fabian Review new year issue. Like Harry Truman, embracing the status of the underdog could be the key to political recovery.
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We all want to live in a fair society. But what should that mean - and how could we get there? I propose that our core fairness test could be this: that we should not inherit our life chances at birth.

In Britain today, where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little.

The vision of a free and fair society would be one which extends to us all the autonomy to author our own life stories - challenging the extent to which this is determined by forces beyond our control.

This ‘fight against fate’ - breaking the cycle of disadvantage to make life chances more equal - could provide the lodestar to guide future action and campaigns for equality.

But even if we have an accurate understanding of social mobility, we need a deeper agenda for more equal life chances.
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