Who will the Brexiteers blame when the milk and honey fails to flow?

Rafael Behr in The Guardian


There is a question that was never put to the leaders of the campaign for Brexit and has not, as far as I’m aware, been put to the prime minister since her conversion to the cause. It is this: what will you do on the morning of formal separation from the EU that you could not have done the day before?

What restored freedom, what action hitherto proscribed by the tyrannical bureaucrats of Brussels, will you indulge as the sparkling English wine is uncorked? Bend a banana, perhaps. Or catch the Eurostar to Paris and savour the sensation of no longer having the automatic right to work there. Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy! … Bliss it will be in that dawn to be alive. Right?

Brexit enthusiasts will complain that my question is unfair. Objections to EU membership were all about democracy, sovereignty and long-term economic opportunity: not pleasures that can be consumed overnight. And while that might be so, it is also true that people tend to vote for things in expectation of tangible benefits. A weekly dividend of £350m for the NHS, for example. So the unlikelihood of quick gratification for leave voters is a problem.

Theresa May identifies a deeper imperative to Brexit than was written on the referendum ballot paper. She hears a collective cry of rage against the economic and political status quo, requiring radical change on multiple fronts. So, in parallel with the prime minister’s plan for a “clean break” from the rest of Europe, Downing Street is thinking of ways to address grievances that generated demand for Brexit in the first place: stagnant wages; anxiety that living standards have peaked and that the next generation is being shafted; the demoralising experience of working all hours without saving a penny.

Government thinking on these issues has so far yielded a modest harvest. Last week’s housing white paper was meant to address a chronic shortage of homes by nudging councils towards quicker approval of new developments. Last month saw the launch of an industrial strategy, embracing state activism to nurture growth in under-resourced sectors and neglected regions. Last year May appointed Matthew Taylor, formerly head of Tony Blair’s policy unit, to lead a review into modern employment practices – the decline of the stable, rewarding full-time career and its replacement by poorly paid, insecure casual servitude.

‘Ed Miliband’s focus on the squeezed middle anticipated Theresa May’s promise to help those who are just-about-managing.’ Photograph: Alamy
A notable feature of this non-Brexit agenda is how closely it tracks arguments made by Ed Miliband in the last parliament. The former Labour leader had a whole thesis about the structural failings of British capitalism and how it corroded people’s confidence in the future, leaving them anxious and angry. His focus on the “squeezed middle” anticipated May’s promise to help those who are “just-about-managing”. Miliband’s calls for state intervention in failing markets were derided by the Tories as socialist delusion at the time, but he opened rhetorical doors through which May is now tentatively stepping. Last week’s housing paper even used a forgotten policy that Labour had launched in 2013 – a “Use it or lose it” threat to developers who hoard land without building on it.

 

Meanwhile, Downing Street has taken a close interest in the commission on economic justice set up by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a thinktank that provided regular policymaking services for Labour in the days before its capture by Corbynism. The commission was recently invited to give a presentation to May’s leading policy advisers inside No 10.

Were it not for Brexit’s domination of political debate, May’s eschewal of conventional left-right dividing lines – her willingness to jettison Thatcherite orthodoxies – might have attracted more notice. But then, as the old Yiddish saying goes, if my granny had balls she’d be my grandpa. The idea that there is some parallel realm of politics that May can develop and for which she will be remembered alongside her EU negotiation is delusional. Timid little steps on housing, industrial strategy and job security are not going to get the prime minister to the promised land of fairness and opportunity in time for Brexit day. And she insists on a diversion to set up more grammar schools along the way, despite nearly every expert in the field warning that educational selection closes more avenues to social mobility than it opens.


Someone will have to level with the country. The dawn of Brexit promises no freedom that wasn’t there the day before

Even on immigration the government cannot meet expectations raised by the leave campaign. There will still be new people arriving because businesses will insist on a capacity to hire from abroad. Millions who arrived in Britain over recent decades, and their children born as British citizens, will stay because the country is their home. Even the most draconian border regime cannot restore the ethnic homogeneity for which some nostalgic Brexiteers pine.

At some point someone is going to have to level with the country. Much of what leave voters were promised is unavailable because the EU was never responsible for a lot of things that made them angry. The dawn of Brexit promises no significant freedom or opportunity that wasn’t there the day before. It isn’t a message that ex-remainers can deliver, for all the reasons that scuppered their campaign last year. It sounded patronising before the referendum and the tone isn’t improved by bitterness in defeat.

None of the original leave campaigners will dare admit their dishonesty in making Brussels the scapegoat for every conceivable social and economic ill. There is no point expecting Boris Johnson or Michael Gove to embark on a self-critical journey of public-expectation management. Far more likely they will be drawn deeper into the old lie: someone must be held responsible when Brexit does not unblock the sluices of wealth and opportunity; when the milk and honey refuse to flow. The obvious candidates are foreigners and fifth columnists – EU governments that negotiate in bad faith; alien interlopers who drain public services; unpatriotic “remoaners” talking the country down.

The question then is whether the prime minister will go along with that game. She has managed so far to sustain the pretence that dealing with the failure of Britain’s economy to share its bounties fairly and quitting the EU are kind of the same thing. If it turns out that they aren’t, and one ambition obstructs the other, who will she blame?

The Daily Mail may not realise, but Marxists are patriots

The traducing of Ralph Miliband is a reminder of how far we now are from understanding socialism

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 20.15 BST

‘The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years indicates that people are turning again to an analysis of the exploitative logic of capitalism that remains singularly accurate and powerful.' Photograph: PA

Whatever their views of him, most decent people backed Ed Miliband this week as he defended his father against jingoist attacks on him by the Daily Mail. The Labour leader angrily described Ralph Miliband as a British patriot, and correctly noted that he does not share his father's principled commitment to socialism. Labour is right to demand an apology from the Mail, not only for a frankly bigoted attack on a respected Jewish intellectual, but also for claiming that the party's politics bear any resemblance to the socialism it formally abandoned nearly two decades ago.

The defence of Ralph Miliband runs along wearyingly familiar lines – that he unambiguously proved his patriotism by fighting in the anti-Nazi war, which along with "no apology for the empire" has become the principal litmus test for love of Britain. His lifelong commitment to a supple Marxism is noted but quietly skimmed over as an embarrassingly anachronistic aspect of an otherwise decent and loyal man. Yet a defence of Miliband senior which does not also challenge the red-bashing that often goes hand in hand with antisemitism is, at best, equivocal. More perniciously, it accepts the distorted terms set by the rightwing press which defines patriotism narrowly through obedient adulation of monarchy, militarism and elitism.

Ralph Miliband was not a patriot because he served in the navy. He was a lover of this country and its people precisely because he understood that institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords symbolise and perpetuate inequality, and that militarism usually encourages the poor to die defending the interests of the privileged. Hispatriotism has more in common with long progressive patriotic traditions in Britain, from the Diggers and Levellers to the Chartists and anti-privatisation campaigners. It was about claiming land and country for the majority of its labouring denizens rather than the plutocrats and the powerful who live off the fat of the land while spouting an insincere "nationalism" which serves less to create collective wellbeing than to prevent their privileges being questioned.

Even while noting that Ralph criticised Eric Hobsbawm for not repudiating Stalinism, the Daily Mail recyles the false charge that adherence to Marxism is indistinguishable from commitment to a poisonous Sovietism. This is no different from claiming that Christianity is indistinguishable from the bloody crusades and inquisitions conducted by some of its adherents. However, Ralph Miliband would also have found his son's claim that capitalism can be "made to work for working people" incoherent, and wilfully ignorant of how capitalism actually works, constitutively reliant as it is on concentrating wealth among relatively few while extracting the labour of the many.

For years, captains of corporations in the affluent west have been able to peddle the myth that capitalism can be made to work for everyone by outsourcing its most exploitative aspects to other parts of the world, extracting both resources and labour ruthlessly. Now, however – as the centre of capitalist gravity shifts southwards, the western social democratic compact unravels, and the foundations of the welfare state are disastrously undermined – it will be less easy to keep up this pretence of affluence for all.

The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years alone indicate that people are turning once again to an analysis of the fundamentally exploitative logic of capitalism that, for all its relentless bad press, remains singularly accurate and powerful.

It is time to junk the cheap and facile propaganda that socialism is reducible to Stalinist depredations. In Ralph Miliband's own anti-Stalinist understanding, socialism was about "the wholesale transformation of the social order" by giving ordinary people control over the economic system, fully democratising a political system in which ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and helpless, and ensuring "a drastic levelling out of social inequality". It is the abandonment of these democratic aspirations for the craven pieties of the Daily Mail that must really "disturb everyone who loves this country".

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail?

The Guardian has published an extensive critique of the Daily Mail and its reporting of Labour, press regulation and the Snowden leaks. We invited Mail readers to join in that debate. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief, asked for the opportunity to comment. Here is his contribution

• 
• • Paul Dacre
  • The Guardian, Saturday 12 October 2013

Paul Dacre: 'Our crime is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life.' Montage: Guardian

Out in the real world, it was a pretty serious week for news. The US was on the brink of budget default, a British court heard how for two years social workers failed to detect the mummified body of a four-year-old starved to death by his mother, and it was claimed that the then Labour health secretary had covered up unnecessary deaths in a NHS hospital six months before the election.

In contrast, the phoney world of Twitter, the London chatterati and left-wing media was gripped 10 days ago by collective hysteria as it became obsessed round-the-clock by one story – a five-word headline on page 16 in the Daily Mail.

The screech of axe-grinding was deafening as the paper's enemies gleefully leapt to settle scores.

Leading the charge, inevitably, was the Mail's bête noir, the BBC. Fair-minded readers will decide themselves whether the hundreds of hours of airtime it devoted to that headline reveal a disturbing lack of journalistic proportionality and impartiality – but certainly the one-sided tone in their reporting allowed Labour to misrepresent Geoffrey Levy's article on Ralph Miliband.

The genesis of that piece lay in Ed Miliband's conference speech. The Mail was deeply concerned that in 2013, after all the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, the leader of the Labour party was announcing its return, complete with land seizures and price fixing.

Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence the Labour leader's Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in his speeches, had on his thinking.

So it was that Levy's article examined the views held by Miliband senior over his lifetime, not just as a 17-year-old youth as has been alleged by our critics.

The picture that emerged was of a man who gave unqualified support to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, who loathed the market economy, was in favour of a workers' revolution, denigrated British traditions and institutions such as the royal family, the church and the army and was overtly dismissive of western democracy.

Levy's article argued that the Marxism that inspired Ralph Miliband had provided the philosophical underpinning of one of history's most appalling regimes – a regime, incidentally, that totally crushed freedom of expression.

Nowhere did the Mail suggest that Ralph Miliband was evil – only that the political beliefs he espoused had resulted in evil. As for the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain", our point was simply this: Ralph Miliband was, as a Marxist, committed to smashing the institutions that make Britain distinctively British – and, with them, the liberties and democracy those institutions have fostered.

Yes, the Mail is happy to accept that in his personal life, Ralph Miliband was, as described by his son, a decent and kindly man – although we won't withdraw our view that he supported an ideology that caused untold misery in the world.

Yes, we accept that he cherished this country's traditions of tolerance and freedom – while, in a troubling paradox typical of the left, detesting the very institutions and political system that made those traditions possible.

And yes, the headline was controversial – but popular newspapers have a long tradition of using provocative headlines to grab readers' attention. In isolation that headline may indeed seem over the top, but read in conjunction with the article we believed it was justifiable.

Despite this we acceded to Mr Miliband's demand – and by golly, he did demand – that we publish his 1,000-word article defending his father.

So it was that, in a virtually unprecedented move, we published his words at the top of our op ed pages. They were accompanied by an abridged version of the original Levy article and a leader explaining why the Mail wasn't apologising for the points it made.

The hysteria that followed is symptomatic of the post-Leveson age in which any newspaper which dares to take on the left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down by the Twitter mob who the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain.

As the week progressed and the hysteria increased, it became clear that this was no longer a story about an article on Mr Miliband's Marxist father but a full-scale war by the BBC and the left against the paper that is their most vocal critic.

Orchestrating this bile was an ever more rabid Alastair Campbell. Again, fair-minded readers will wonder why a man who helped drive Dr David Kelly to his death, was behind the dodgy Iraq war dossier and has done more to poison the well of public discourse than anyone in Britain is given so much air-time by the BBC.

But the BBC's blood lust was certainly up. Impartiality flew out of the window. Ancient feuds were settled. Not to put too fine a point on things, we were right royally turned over.

Fair enough, if you dish it out, you take it. But my worry is that there was a more disturbing agenda to last week's events.

Mr Miliband, of course, exults in being the man who destroyed Murdoch in this country. Is it fanciful to believe that his real purpose in triggering last week's row – so assiduously supported by the liberal media which sneers at the popular press – was an attempt to neutralise Associated, the Mail's publishers and one of Britain's most robustly independent and successful newspaper groups.

Let it be said loud and clear that the Mail, unlike News International, did NOT hack people's phones or pay the police for stories. I have sworn that on oath.

No, our crime is more heinous than that.

It is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life and instead represents the views of the ordinary people who are our readers and who don't have a voice in today's political landscape and are too often ignored by today's ruling elite.

The metropolitan classes, of course, despise our readers with their dreams (mostly unfulfilled) of a decent education and health service they can trust, their belief in the family, patriotism, self-reliance, and their over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best.

These people mock our readers' scepticism over the European Union and a human rights court that seems to care more about the criminal than the victim. They scoff at our readers who, while tolerant, fret that the country's schools and hospitals can't cope with mass immigration.

In other words, these people sneer at the decent working Britons – I'd argue they are the backbone of this country – they constantly profess to be concerned about.

The truth is that there is an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the Mail in leftish circles, for whom the word 'suburban' is an obscenity. They simply cannot comprehend how a paper that opposes the mindset they hold dear can be so successful and so loved by its millions of readers.

Well, I'm proud that the Mail stands up for those readers.

I am proud that our Dignity For The Elderly Campaign has for years stood up for Britain's most neglected community. Proud that we have fought for justice for Stephen Lawrence, Gary McKinnon and the relatives of the victims of the Omagh bombing, for those who have seen loved ones suffer because of MRSA and the Liverpool Care Pathway. I am proud that we have led great popular campaigns for the NSPCC and Alzheimer's Society on the dangers of paedophilia and the agonies of dementia. And I'm proud of our war against round-the-clock drinking, casinos, plastic bags, internet pornography and secret courts.

No other newspaper campaigns as vigorously as the Mail and I am proud of the ability of the paper's 400 journalists (the BBC has 8,000) to continually set the national agenda on a whole host of issues.

I am proud that for years, while most of Fleet Street were in thrall to it, the Mail was the only paper to stand up to the malign propaganda machine of Tony Blair and his appalling henchman, Campbell (and, my goodness, it's been payback time over the past week!).

Could all these factors also be behind the left's tsunami of opprobrium against the Mail last week? I don't know but I do know that for a party mired in the corruption exposed by Damian McBride's book (in which Ed Miliband was a central player) to call for a review of the Mail's practices and culture is beyond satire.

Certainly, the Mail will not be silenced by a Labour party that has covered up unnecessary, and often horrific, deaths in NHS hospitals, and suggests instead that it should start looking urgently at its own culture and practices.

Some have argued that last week's brouhaha shows the need for statutory press regulation. I would argue the opposite. The febrile heat, hatred, irrationality and prejudice provoked by last week's row reveals why politicians must not be allowed anywhere near press regulation.

And while the Mail does not agree with the Guardian over the stolen secret security files it published, I suggest that we can agree that the fury and recrimination the story is provoking reveals again why those who rule us – and who should be held to account by newspapers – cannot be allowed to sit in judgment on the press.

That is why the left should be very careful about what it wishes for – especially in the light of this week's rejection by the politicians of the newspaper industry's charter for robust independent self-regulation.

The BBC is controlled, through the licence fee, by the politicians. ITV has to answer to Ofcom, a government quango. Newspapers are the only mass media left in Britain free from the control of the state.

The Mail has recognised the hurt Mr Miliband felt over our attack on his father's beliefs. We were happy to give him considerable space to describe how his father had fought for Britain (though a man who so smoothly diddled his brother risks laying himself open to charges of cynicism if he makes too much of a fanfare over familial loyalties).

For the record, the Mail received a mere two letters of complaint before Mr Miliband's intervention and only a few hundred letters and emails since – many in support. A weekend demonstration against the paper attracted just 110 people.

It seems that in the real world people – most of all our readers – were far more supportive of us than the chatterati would have you believe.

PS – this week the head of MI5 – subsequently backed by the PM, the deputy PM, the home secretary and Labour's elder statesman Jack Straw – effectively accused the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing stolen secret security files. The story – which is of huge significance – was given scant coverage by a BBC which only a week ago had devoted days of wall-to-wall pejorative coverage to the Mail. Again, I ask fair readers, what is worse: to criticise the views of a Marxist thinker, whose ideology is anathema to most and who had huge influence on the man who could one day control our security forces … or to put British lives at risk by helping terrorists?

-------

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Campbell's bravura performance took on the Mail's venomous world view, which is that, as an immigrant, you are only ever tolerated

• 
• • Alex Andreou
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 October 2013 13.03 BST

So, to recap the effects of that Daily Mail article on Ralph Miliband: It robbed the Conservative party conference of the headlines it expected – it was ahead of any of their policy announcements all yesterday in most news bulletins, across most channels. It reinforced Ed Miliband's image, for the second week running, as someone of integrity who stands up to bullies. It secured him sympathy and support from most political opponents. It caused a social media reaction which refreshed everyone's memory about the Daily Mail's historical links with Mosley and Hitler. It even managed to revive interest in the Leveson inquiry's recommendations. All in all, it was the journalistic equivalent of a glorious Stan Laurel pratfall.

It also marked the moment when Alastair Campbell singled himself out as the natural successor to Jeremy Paxman. You know, the Paxman of old, when it was his line of questioning which caused a stir, rather than the configuration of his facial fuzz. It was all at once both refreshing to see someone properly "grilled" on Newsnight for the first time in months, and depressing that it had to be by another guest.

It was also, personally, a rather odd moment to find oneself rooting for Alastair Campbell. You got a glimpse of how utterly terrifying he must have been to deal with, when he was Blair's press pointman. How overwhelming and irresistible. A glimpse of how his ability to grind down anyone expressing a contrary view may have contributed to both the success and the hubris of the Labour party at that time. At the same time, as someone hoping that Cameron will be relegated to oblivion at the next election, I had to admit: if I could employ him to help bring that about, I would have to consider it. I may not like him, but – boy – is he good at his job!

Within 10 minutes, he got further than all the other television news political editors and correspondents put together did over 24 hours. He secured an admission from the Mail's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, that, at the very least, using a photograph of Ralph Miliband's grave was an "error". He succeeded in exposing internal rifts within the Daily Mail, by outlining the areas where even Paul Dacre's deputy refused to support him. The coup de grace was the phrase "the Daily Mail is the worst of British values, posing as the best". I suspect it will follow the Mail for many years to come. It was a bravura performance.

He even got close to unpacking the wider point. How is it that one can extrapolate hatred of Britain from criticism of its institutions? It seems that sections of the press (and, I'm sure, the public) are never far from the McCarthyist view, that wanting to change the way the state works makes one an enemy of the state. But there is a further point bubbling under the surface. Implicit in the Daily Mail's venom is the idea that being republican (in the wider, rather than US, sense), being suspicious of organised religion, being a pacifist or a socialist – all these things, which are upsetting to the Mail and its readership – become a cardinal sin if you are also a foreigner.

As a foreigner with strong opinions, I have come across this hundreds of times, in various permutations. As an immigrant one has no right to criticise any aspect of the UK. Regardless of how long one has been here, regardless of the validity of one's opinion, regardless, even, it seems, of serving in the military during a war, the immigrant's stake is limited. He is tolerated, but should watch himself. The invitation can easily be withdrawn. He should be grateful unconditionally. That Daily Mail article is just a longer version of, "If you don't like it here, you can fuck off back to your own country". It is an attitude that is not only still prevalent, but permeates the political rhetoric on Europe, trade, foreign policy and immigration.

It is this snobbery, resistance to new ideas and sense of inflated ego that are truly holding Britain back from being all it can be. It puts me in mind of something the American journalist and essayist Sydney J Harris wrote:

"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."

Freeze energy prices and cause the Apocalypse

MARK STEEL in THE INDEPENDENT

If energy companies are asked to get by on £6bn a year, they might as well not bother

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By the weekend I expect we’ll have more details about the consequences of Labour’s proposed price freeze. EDF will announce that once its profits are curtailed slightly, it’ll have to sack the man who checks for bare sparking wires at the National Grid, so Devon will burn down, and the smoke from a flaming Torquay will cause planes full of especially furry puppies to crash into the Atlantic causing a tsunami that puts out the sun, making us turn the heating up even more than usual.

With no gas we’ll have to live on tinned food, but with no light we’ll cut ourselves on the jagged lids, and the smell of an entire nation bleeding will attract sharks that will evolve legs and the ability to live in dark and cold and will rule the world. So think about that before you vote Labour.

Some newspapers and politicians are suggesting this collapse into a post-electric wasteland will be inevitable. The Daily Mail listed seven steps toward “blackouts, pensions hit and years of uncertainty”. Tomorrow it’ll explain the next seven, starting: “Step 1 – with no gas fires, Britain will turn into a glacier, and Ranulph Fiennes will be appointed Prime Minister as he’ll be the only person who can travel to work.” And: “Step 2 – as our blood turns to ice some of us will be drained and used as a venue in the Winter Olympics.”

The proposal is “insane”, it says, and an assortment of experts have made comments such as: “Not putting up gas all the time is clearly PSYCHOTIC and DERANGED. It’s also emerged that Harold Shipman started out by not wanting to put up the price of gas, and only when he got away with that did he take it one stage further and murder everyone.”

Neil Woodford, the largest shareholder in the energy company Centrica, has already said: “If Centrica can’t make money supplying electricity then they won’t supply it. The lights will go off, the economy will shut down.”

That sounds a little like a threat, the sort of thing The Joker’s spokesperson might say, having rephrased the original statement of “everyone must pay me what I demand or I will plunge the city into darkness and steal their economy mwaaaaa ha ha haaaaa”. Still, at least he’s not holding the country to ransom, like teachers who vote for a half-day strike.

A spokesman for Centrica said the catastrophe would happen because “it would not be economically viable to continue supplying energy if prices were capped”. And you can sympathise, because last year the six main energy companies were only able to pay dividends of £7bn. So if they’re asked for one year to get by on only £6bn, they might as well not bother and plunge the country into an apocalyptic arena of death instead.

The energy companies also state that falling dividends will make us worse off, because this will hit pension funds. And we can be sure that’s their main concern. Sam Laidlaw, the chief executive of Centrica with a salary of £5m, and the five British Gas executives who took a total of £11m in bonuses, will be distraught at the effect on pensioners, and won’t for a moment have considered the impact on their own pay. Hopefully, they’ll receive counselling, from someone who can explain they must think of themselves occasionally, as they can’t just worry about the needs of old people ALL the time.

What we’re asked to understand by critics of this proposal, is that if the energy companies have to keep their prices down, that makes the majority of us worse off. So if you’re sensible, when you receive your gas bill you’ll say: “Oh no, is that all it is? I hope next time I have to pay much more, otherwise I’ll be short of money.”

If those who insist lower energy bills make us worse off are right, instead of freezing their prices, the Government needs to make us take a second job delivering pizzas and send all the money to npower, ensuring we’re much better off. If pensioners are too old to ride a moped, they should be forced to sell their pets as food and send in the cash, for their own good.

Despite this logic, Ed Miliband’s promise to restrain detested companies seems popular, as even the Daily Mail admits. So Peter Mandelson has condemned it, his argument being: “He mustn’t suggest a policy that most people like, can’t he see that makes him unelectable.”

I suppose the unease is due to the uncertain electoral outcome of this proposal, which depends on the arithmetic. Chief executives of energy companies are now less likely to vote Labour, whereas everyone else is more likely, so someone will have to work out which of these two categories is bigger.

It could also be argued, that as Centrica executives have stated a brief marginal reduction in their gargantuan profits will mean it won’t be worthwhile continuing to supply electricity at all, in which case they will merrily turn off the entire supply, they are the people least worthy of being in charge of it, and it ought to be taken off them altogether and given to any random person in the street rather than left in the hands of such a bunch of psychos.

Maybe Ed can fill in that detail in the manifesto 

My Weltanschhaung - 8/2/2012

I watched Prime Minister's questions and noticed that everytime David Cameron felt uncomfortable, he used David Miliband to beat Ed Miliband with. I wondered what that had to do with Ed's questions on the NHS.

I have come to the conclusion that reform or not the NHS will get progressively worse year upon year.

I was surprised at the all party unity in the UK on invading Syria and the hatred towards the Russian and Chinese veto at the UN. Who said imperialism was dead?

I look forward to Argentina raising the Falklands issue at the UN. Will the UK use its veto then?

On of my students opined that a small shareholder could influence decision making in a big corporation, and hence he was a believer in corporate democracy as against political democracy.


I watched two BBC programmes on the ancient African kingdoms of Ashante and Zulu. Very Good.

Tips in PR management during a crisis

By John McTernan in The Telegraph

8:11PM BST 20 Jul 2011

Halfway through my time as his political secretary, Tony Blair offered me some excellent advice: “You only have to break one of their legs, John.” In vain did I protest that I had never broken a single leg, let alone both. The point Blair was making was that political operatives need to be either feared or respected.

The truth, exposed horrendously over the past fortnight, is that David Cameron’s current operation in Downing Street is neither.

The issue here is not that Ed Miliband has made the political weather – though he has. It is that the Government’s response has been supine. In a crisis, what is required from the centre is “grip”: a tightly controlled and clearly visible strategy that reframes the problem and creates the political space for you to move on. None of that has been apparent.

What should Downing Street have done? Well, the first rule of crisis management is that you need to understand the full dimensions of the problem. That means assembling all the facts: getting everyone together, collecting all the data, making sure that you know exactly what happened and when. Above all, it requires you to ask all the questions that you know will be put to you, especially the ones that you fear the most. This has clearly not been done.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister could not say whether Neil Wallis, the former News of the World executive who apparently acted as an informal adviser to Andy Coulson before the election, had been into Downing Street to see Coulson after it.

Well, someone in the Garden Room – the home of the elite administrators who keep the Government ticking over – could have checked the diary.
More basically, everyone who comes into No 10 has an entry on a database that the police check at the gate. A simple search would have sufficed to provide the PM with an answer. And that was just one small fact. What was needed was a far more searching process that pulled together every angle, and every possible line of attack.
This was not because full, frank and fearless disclosure was required, but because a choice had to be made. Just as you get only one chance to make a first impression, in a scandal you get only one chance to make a clean breast of things.
The key, though, is to realise that you don’t need to tell the whole truth – just nothing but the truth. Don’t lie. Don’t equivocate. But set out a defensible truth: one that you will not have to expand, modify or resile from.
In all crises, there is a similar pattern. Some information will initially be suppressed, but it will dribble out, or be dragged out. In any event, it won’t be kept secret, and when it emerges, you will end up looking shifty or malevolent. Full disclosure is important, but – speaking cynically – only of what will eventually come out.
Be economical if you are sure some sources are utterly secure. Just be honest about what will become public, and don’t try to conceal it. In any scandal, there are some things it is impossible to evade; your only chance of survival will be to endure them.
To date, there have been no signs that anyone in No 10 has grasped these laws. Paradoxically, the last Cameron staffer who got this, who could have predicted and anticipated the trajectory that the story would take, was Andy Coulson.
With Coulson gone, there has been no trace of the feral in the No 10 DNA – indeed, the new Downing Street prides itself on being a less political place than under Labour, and on operating with fewer special advisers.
What this fails to take into account is that politics is a contact sport. It’s not about “sofa government”: it’s about effective government. No one would have called Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s consigliere, “feral”, but he always had someone who could do the business as part of his team: tough, respected operators such as Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan, Pat McFadden or Darren Murphy.
Who fits the bill in the current set-up? Search me. Indeed, search the house, and the surrounding buildings. No one can do the necessary low politics. For example, Ed Llewellyn, the current chief of staff, is as decent a man as I have dealt with in politics.
He understands that his role is, in part, to shield the Prime Minister from trouble. But in apparently failing to pass on warnings about Andy Coulson, he neglected his duty to put the difficult questions to the boss, even if they were rejected.
The entire civil service machine is paid to say yes to the PM, but his staff – particularly the most senior – are paid to say no. It is fine for him to press ahead with his chosen strategy, but he should have the alternatives, and the costs and benefits, laid out.
The greatest asset of the Cameron operation is the Prime Minister himself. His performance in the Commons yesterday, for example, was typically polished. No one can match his sweeping mastery of the Chamber, or his contemptuous dismissal of objectionable questions. It was a classic of its kind: hours on his feet, answering endless questions, super-cool, witty, calm.
And yet the flaws were revealing. First, it was all his own work. We were back to Cameron in his pomp, the greatest single explicator of the Government’s policies, actions and strategies.
It’s a huge gift, and the Coalition would sink without it. But it emphasised once more that this is what he is – the only one who can make that compelling case. And second, it was a Commons performance on an issue that has broken through to the streets.
Earlier this week, my partner realised that the two women walking behind her on a suburban street were discussing the quality and veracity of News International’s evidence to the select committee. This has become an issue where the public know (and care) enough to become expert.
This is where the flaws in No 10’s strategy – or lack of it – will rebound on the PM. At certain key moments yesterday, he showed a fatal lack of detail, or recall. Why was there no ready response to Tom Watson’s question about his letter to Cameron, which contained warnings about Coulson that went ignored? The PM and his team can’t have imagined that Watson would be absent, or that the Speaker would overlook him.
And why so evasive on the private firm that “vetted” Coulson – is the name really going to stay secret? After all, it would have received government money, and elsewhere ministers boast of total transparency in costs and supply of services.
All governments need head-kickers: in their Cabinets, on their backbenches, and in their offices. It has been a stunning miscalculation not to have a proper political operation in No 10 – and arguably, yet another way that the Coalition has deeply damaged the Tory party. Worse, it has deprived Cameron of a key instrument of government: effective enforcement.
For want of a strategy, Cameron is now tied to Coulson: if the latter is shown to have lied – indeed, if he is convicted of perjury – it is unlikely that a prime ministerial apology to the Commons will be sufficient penance. Sir John Junor used to ask, in his own inimitable way: “Who is in charge of the clattering train?” Well, who is?