It’s a dark day for me as a Liberal, but I find myself in agreement with the Daily Fail. I despise the Mail, and pretty much everything they stand for, but Harperson’s Equality Act definitely has a sting in the tail.

In my view, Positive Discrimination is still discrimination and it is wrong. Even in this limited way, endorsing discrimination perpetuates it, rather than eradicating it. It adds vast amounts of resentment for little perceivable benefit.
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Robin Simcox has typically blasted the idea of negotiating with terrorists over at the Henry Jackson Society- according to him, negotiating with terrorists is betraying our values and ceding ground to a universal caliphate. He defines terrorists as including everyone from Hamas to the Taliban to Osama Bin Laden to a kid on a council estate with some stupid ideas. There are two things wrong with Mr Simcox’s analysis and two reasons why I think we should definitely negotiate with terrorists- lets think about two kinds of terrorist threat and then we might dig into them both to see if we can solve them through going and talking to people who are involved in terrorist activity. (more…)

Sunny asked if I could cross post this investigative article from the Ministry, which examines the use of a private jet, owned by Lord Ashcroft, by Conservative ministers (specifically William Hague) and raises questions about whether these flights are being correctly reported to the Electoral Commission in line with current laws on the reporting of donations.

(The short answer to all this is that it appears that a grey area in law is being exploited to allow the value of these flights to be massively underreported and, as a bit of bonus, an FOIA request I made in January caught Hague making late registrations, more than a year late in one case.)

I’ve given it a bit of thought and I’m not going to cross post the full article - you can all follow the link and read it if you’ve a mind to, although I’d have a cup of coffee and a sandwich to hand as there’s really no short way to do investigative articles which rely on collating and presenting evidence. Instead of repeating myself over here I’ve decided, instead, to extend on from the information in that article and have a crack at demonstrating conclusively that something more than a bit iffy is going on. (more…)

I mean, when was the last time there was such consensus between the Tories and Labour? (Small voice in back of head: Er, Thursday, wasn’t it?) No, no, no, Small Voice, I mean about tax cuts, of all things!

Labour have laid out their spending plans for 2009-10 and tax cuts ain’t part of the deal. And the Tories, while protesting that of course the world is about to fall apart and if they aren’t allowed back to the economic helm we’re all going to end up living on rubbish tips and eating roadkill, have nonetheless quietly accepted them. No tax cuts for at least the “first term” of Tory government, we learn from the laughably hubristic Mr Philip Hammond in the Sunday Telegraph.

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British Foreign policy is an interesting beast at the moment. Politicians talk a lot about punching above our weight in the world- as though Britain was a middle weight boxer in a heavy weight world and the seat on the UN security council not to mention troops in South West Asia signify a country with aspirations to world power status. But the UK is in a rather odd position- a position mirrored by many of its European partners. We are a small island state- which for historical reasons has been incredibly powerful- and yet has a population of only 50 million.

Compare that to the behemoths of China and India with over a billion people each, the United States or Brazil with 300 million or even Russia with a population of 150 million. The truth is that the UK is only so powerful because proportionately its people are more wealthy than the Brazilians, Chinese or Indians- but its in the interests of the people of the UK that that doesn’t continue to be true.
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Iraq has become the elephant in the room in some discussions of international relations amongst a certain section of liberal-left opinion. David Miliband opened his recent speech about democracy by saying that it had ‘clouded the debate’ about how to promote this, but the main lesson he seemed to draw from it is that future ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions.’

The speech was actually more thoughtful than this extract suggests, but by failing to make it clear the exact circumstances in which the British government would use military force, the Foreign Secretary tied himself to a policy which by every measurable standard has been a complete disaster.

The invasion of Iraq was illegal.
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The Financial Times reports on the government’s proposals to do ’something’ about illegal file sharing. That something is to make ISPs the law enforcer; they will be penalised if people use their networks to share files. There has been talk of a ‘three-strikes’ system whereby ISPs would be obliged to remove service from their customers if they’re found to be illegally file-sharing on three occasions. If ISPs have not acted by April of next year, the government will legislate.

The big objection I have is that it makes the ISPs responsible for policing. This is a really bad idea. Spectacularly bad. I’m hoping that Tom Watson, as a minster responsible for this who was, as a backbencher, supportive of Tim Ireland et al during the Usmanov affair, will take note and make this point to his colleagues.
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Green Party policy on abortion was already pretty solid, saying that the party would not back any change in the law to reduce women’s access to abortion.

But I am pleased to say that after the Spring Conference in Reading, which concluded yesterday, it is now rather better, backing three changes to recognise medical developments: to remove the requirement to obtain two doctors’ signatures, to allow nurses and midwives to perform abortions, and to loosen restrictions on where abortions can be performed.

These are all measures backed (in slightly varying patterns) by the Royal College of Nurses, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Ob/Gyn, and match the finding of the Joint parliamentary committee on science and technology - which found that they would reduce waits for abortions that would anyway being carried out.

You would think that all sides of the debate would agree that earlier abortions are preferable to later ones, but I’m not seeing any sign of such sense from those who are trying to use the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to reduce women’s access to abortion.
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As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the story of the Fremantle Trust careworkers who spent much of 2007 striking against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The dispute is unresolved.

Part one of this series.

A year’s a long while to fight your employer. Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust’s Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there’s much point to it. She will “keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,” but she doubts that Fremantle will budge. “Fremantle doesn’t give a shit about its staff. It’s gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.”

One thing everybody is specially stressed about is Barnet Council’s recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home - that’s the carehome that Jones works at.

Fremantle says it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere. Careworkers say families of residents at the carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect that being dragged out of one home into another will have on their elderly relatives.
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If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become de-ideologised.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of ‘golden mean’ to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.
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Over 150 people crammed into committee room 9 last night for a lively and informed debate on migration. The meeting was chaired by the country’s leading social policy commentator Polly Toynbee. The debate first heard from the Minister for Immigration, Liam Byrne who set out the reasons why he believes the policies being implemented by Labour are “firm but fair”.

Byrne drew on his own heritage as the decendent of a migrant family coming to work in the UK. Forwarding a “work hard and play by the rules” argument Bryne drew on the economic arguments for a progressive immigration policy and even touched on the moral ones. However, when it came to answering a question on what the differences were between Tory and New Labour policies Bryne did seem to struggle.

Byrne was followed by an impassioned speech by Don Flynn of the Migrants’ Rights Network, and editor of the Compass publication, Towards a Progressive Immigration Policy, who set out a critical view of the government’s record and called on the government ‘to stop moving the goal posts’, strongly urging that the government put social justice at the heart of policy, in order for its rhetoric to live up to the reality.
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A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.

The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I’ve attended. Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman’s right to choose.

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About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed - and opportunistic - anti-abortion amendments to the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.

The bill - as you doubtless have guessed - has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it’s about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain’t putting the god-squad off.

One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term - to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting - to children they know are doomed.

MPs might be crazy, but they’re not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
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Since writing my recent article supporting John Edwards in the Democratic primary race, a number of people have asked me why my arguments (which centre around the election of a Democratic president galvanising more radical change by opening up a space to that party’s left) would not simply hold true for any Democratic candidate. Those on the left who don’t think I’m wrong even to advocate a Democratic vote point out that whilst Edwards would be the preferable nominee, his name not being on the ballot paper doesn’t completely change the underlying process. Even Hillary Clinton’s election would surely be politically preferable to that of, say, Mike Huckabee. Further it would be supported by a majority of the US working class, and would mark a decisive break with the Bush era.

Yet I think there is a difference, and one which goes beyond the obvious fact that Edwards’ political stances are well to the left of Clinton’s. Unfashionable though it is on today’s left to mention such things, I think there is an issue of character that would prevent me from advocating a Clinton vote.

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At both the last US Presidential election, I took a stance that is not popular on the UK left - one of support for a critical Democratic vote. For those of you who are unaware of my political heritage and who may be surprised that such an apparently uncontroversial stance would excite any kind of debate at all on the liberal-left, allow me to explain. The political background from which I come is one of the left in union and wider labour movement politics, where Trotskyist groups, all of which have a visceral loathing for the Democrats, have loomed large. Indeed, they were only ever really willing to call for a vote for the Labour Party in the UK based on a combination of recruitment raiding, and Byzantine theorising that attached an almost religious significance to the never-exercised trade union link with Labour.

Both of these factors having withered on the vine over the past ten years, most of the left (barring a few real no-hopers) have pulled back from automatic support for Labour, and indeed have ended up in many cases in something of a state of confused hopelessness as a consequence. Some indeed have ended up wandering down blind alleys such as the laughably misnamed “Respect” coalition, following quixotic figures such as George Galloway in the desperate hope of being led to a new dawn. Of course, that dawn will transpire to be a mirage, and most have already seen it. But such is the myopic faith even of ex-trotskyists in their will to follow a “line” that some will continue to do so - even as they spend every passing day tearing each other to pieces and opening themselves up for widespread mockery on this blog amongst others. It’s hardly an edifying spectacle.

So in light of such an extraordinary fiasco, what on earth could a refugee from such a risible political community possibly have to contribute to a debate being held on a far larger arena, in the USA? One of the reasons is because I like to think that people can and do learn lessons, and that therefore they are not doomed to carry on repeating the mistakes of the past. (more…)

It’s common knowledge on the left that Christmas is a pernicious racist-imperialist construct, an unholy alliance of Catholicism, Coca Cola and capitalism whose only function is the exploitation and repression of the international working classes. Well, bollocks to that. Christmas is a right laugh, a time for family, friends and frolicking whether you do the God thing or not.

But if we want those doey-eyed little ones looking up at us to have a future free from acid rain, hurricanes and summer floods, it’s time for a festive fightback. No, I don’t mean making common cause with the fundies, but what better day than the feast of Santa Lucia to publish a cut-out-and-keep guide to an enlightened Winterval.

Here are fifteen ideas to get us started; feel free to add your own below.

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.

Whatever side you are on in the Martin Amis controversy, it is notable how far his now-infamous comments on Islam depart from the mainstream of political and intellectual discourse in this country. On the left or the right, it is still rare to see hatred, fear and anger expressed this directly by a member of the intellectual or political elite.

(Book launch info at the end)
We are just seven weeks away from a particularly disturbing anniversary. On January 11, 2008, the Bush administration’s notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for six years. For all this time, the prisoners - or “detainees,” as the government insists on describing them - have been held without charge or trial, and with no sign of when, if ever, they will be released from what Lord Steyn, the British law lord, memorably described as a “legal black hole.”

Like Dave, I doubt the Greens can build a systematic left-wing alternative to Labour, now properly classified as a ‘centre-right’ not a ‘left’ party. But I do believe the popularity of mainstream greenish politics offers something. A ‘moment’, perhaps, for slipping something with a progressive flavour in with the recycling. A reasonable place to look for inspiration is Sweden.

Any attempt to gather a group of like-minded people and to create change is conspiratorial, even if the word tends to applied most often to nefarious forms of action. So, in principle at least, there’s nothing wrong with being part of a conspiracy. The problem is, how do you balance such sectarian forms of politics with other kinds of politics that require listening, convincing, drawing people in?