The Magical Mathematics of Jo Swinson

If he could talk to the Liberals...

Back in the 1980s, the mythical two-headed psuhmi-pull-u creature from Doctor Doolittle was used as an allegory to lampoon the "Two Davids" leadership of the Liberal-SDP Alliance, referencing the not rare instances when Owen and Steel contradicted each other over the centrist parties' policies.

Times change, and this morning on Radio 4 Today, the now long-merged Liberal Democrats have only one head in charge, but several different faces on show.

Party leader Jo Swinson, walking, talking proof that there is nothing more irksome than an incompetent narcissist, held forth, chuntering on her party's latest "bold" decision - to cancel the UK's withdrawal from the European Union without even bothering with the fig-leaf of holding a referendum.

After all, she hubristically declared, if the country elects a majority Liberal Democrat government with cancelling Brexit as its major (some might say only) policy, "then that's what they'll get." PM Swinson would have a mandate to cancel.

It may seem a fanciful scenario, to say the least, but nonetheless galling coming as it does from the party that has spent decades decrying how our first-past-the-post voting system routinely returns parliaments that do not represent the views of voters. As she well knows, and must be banking on in her delusions of grandeur, if the other parties' votes split fairly evenly, a lead party can win outright power with as little as one in three of the votes cast - Tony Bliar achieved his third and final win in 2005 with just 35% of the poll.

So Ms Swinson has somehow executed a mathematical miracle whereby something slightly less that 35% could conceivably count for more than the 52% vote to Leave in the 2016 referendum.

Not so democratic Democrats, it would seem to most rational observers, though with Swinson somehow squaring this with her party supposedly championing liberalism against authoritarianism, reason may not be a word to lightly associate with this band of chancers.

Swinson was not finished though. As the BBC's Justin Webb asked her to confirm in that case that she was now against a so-called People's Vote rerun of the referendum, she changed tack. Not at all - it is party policy after all the have a new vote (perhaps with only one box to tick to approve Remain) before any General Election. It would only be different afterwards and meantime, shame on Jeremy Corbyn, just because... well, shame on him!

So, if you don't want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.
And if you do want a second referendum, vote Lib Dem.

Ok, said Webb - his eyes rolling even on the radio - what about Scotland? Why is she against a second referendum on Scottish independence but apparently in favour of a second one on Brexit?

Ah, totally different, she opined. The best way forward for Britain was to be united but in the European Union.

Fine, so if she wins power at Westminster and that is a mandate to cancel Brexit without a referendum, presumably if the SNP win at Holyrood, that is a mandate for them to declare independence without a referendum.

Of course, you already know her answer was "No."
Essentially, a referendum is only a good thing if you promise to agree with Jo.

And so what we are left with is what we have always known - liberals are not democratic. Their idea of democracy is that the great unwashed turn up every few years and confirm their right to govern at their patronising best. Public votes are fine as long as they go the right way. If they don't, well, time for some of Jo's incredible, liberally illiberal Magical Mathematics.

These are testing times for our society. It was the market-liberal consensus, developed on from Thatcherite monetarism in Nu-Labour and accepted by the wider Political Class, that created the conditions for the Leave vote: the inequality, the competition between marginalised domestic labour and vulnerable migrant workers, the plundering of the state through PFI and financial deregulation that triggered the 2008 recession. The evident self-entitlement of so many MPs in the expenses scandal at the same time did nothing to reconcile growing numbers of disaffected voters with our political leaders. Not the worst by far, Swinson still didn't forget to keep her receipts for a 29p pack of dusters and 78p for a can of Mr Sheen: Lib Dems are nothing if not shiny.

And it was the continuation of this disaster capitalism by the Coalition Government that Swinson was a fairly senior member of that sealed it. And of course the referendum itself was a response by David Cameron to divisions in his own party, one backed by Swinson's party when it was voted on in the Commons in 2015 (she herself to be fair had lost her seat and wasn't in parliament at the time)  - our liberal masters assumed of course a comfortable victory would ensue.

That it didn't, as we know, has been met by furious rebuttals that Leave voters didn't know what they were doing and should effectively be disenfranchised. While some Remainers and People's Voters would protest, the Lib Dems' enthusiastic adoption of Swinson's pledge to scrap Article 50 without a vote confirms that people who claim to be democrats and who have campaigned repeatedly for equal votes are in truth not democrats and are in fact perfectly happy for their own votes to count somewhat more heavily than those of their opponents.

As so many times in history, liberals (of all party hues) proclaim their superior knowledge of the facts and through that assert an informed knowing that eludes ordinary punters but entitles them to govern. The recent resort to the Courts over both the referendum and more recently the proroguing of Parliament betrays an almost naive if arrogant take that they can prove their opponents wrong and if so, everything will go back to meritocratic normality. In doing so, whatever their technical skills level may well be, what is clearly absent is any degree of emotional intelligence.

As we saw with the tick-boxing of Lib Dem policies through the austerity of the Coalition, these people will trumpet getting a deal on introducing a plastic bag tax in exchange for agreeing benefits cuts to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. They will claim that getting some extra funding for mental health counselling somehow makes up for all the suicides caused by introducing arduous tests for disability that were designed to fail vulnerable claimants. They are either clueless or callous, or both.

They will even try to excuse the most execrable decisions by promising to review their procedures to get it right next time, as Chief Whip Alastair Carmichael assured conference doubters over worries about the influx of expelled Tory MPs into their parliamentary ranks. Apparently, each of them was subjected to a 90 minute "grilling" by him to see if they shared the party's values. In spite of this undoubted Ordeal, perhaps via trial-by-lunch, former Tory MP Philip Lee, who opposed gay marriage and introduced legislation to ban migrants with HIV, ticked the relevant boxes.
So illiberal, but so job done...

They are of course playing with fire and are dreadfully ill-equipped to do so. Their actions do nothing to reconcile the deep division in our country, quite the contrary. And with their latest wheeze, they may well have already overplayed a hand they are viewing through a centrist magnifying glass.

The polls suggest that they have already plateaued and started to fall back from their May upsurge in the local and European elections. Swinson's smug style and twisted logic are unlikely to yield many more votes from rival parties. Yet what the polls do show is that her relentless focus on misrepresenting Labour and denouncing Jeremy Corbyn opens up the path to a potentially overwhelming victory for Johnson's Tories, especially if as is not entirely unlikely, they do come to some accommodation with Farage's Brexit Party. Combined, the Tory-BP vote in the current rolling average of polls is 46% to 25% Labour, 18% Lib Dem, 5% Green and 5% Nationalists. Repeated at a General Election, this would produce a Commons with somewhere over 470 hard right MPs out of a total of 650.

Now by Jo Swinson's logic that would be quite a mandate. Even although it might still be the choice of less than half the voters, No Deal would be a dead cert. But perhaps by then Jo will have defaulted to wanting a referendum.

Or maybe not. Maybe she'll be down at the ranch looking for a new pushmi-pull-u.

Illiberal and undemocratic - Swinson and Carmichael

Corbyn and the EU: the Clock is Ticking

The last week has seen the fissures in the Conservative Party rent open for all to see more clearly than ever. With Cabinet Ministers falling like nine-pins in what can only be assumed were well-rehearsed tantrums (even the man who wrote the deal was among those who denounced it and resigned!), Theresa May's Coalition of the Damned seemed on the brink of collapse. Opponents inside and outside ranks circled like vultures over an bloodied prairie dog, while the media salivated over a fresh delivery of meat for their 24 hour newsfeast. Even Labour's Jeremy Corbyn mused that he could muster a little sympathy for the Prime Minister on a personal level - though someone might remind Gentle Jezzer that she was of course the Home Secretary who led on inventing the "hostile environment" for migrants, so any empathy might be better directed elsewhere.

Yet, while May is on the ropes and anyone watching must wonder what she does get out of it for herself, the fact is that she will almost certainly still be PM in 6 months time (just) and the Tories will still be in Government with their DUP Orcs snapping loudly but loyal on the benches behind them. The Tories are masters of survival and this time is no exception - their incumbency entrenched by Nick Clegg's typically short-sighted Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that over 100 Tory turkeys would need to vote for Christmas before there can be a new General Election this side of 2022.

We hear that five Government Ministers - yes, there are still that many left - led by the weasel-minded Michael Gove are sticking with Theresa May to persuade her to amend the deal. This would entail both May and the EU being prepared to renegotiate, which is unlikely in both camps. So that leaves two scenarios: either one where the Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons suddenly fall into line, which will simply not happen; or, more likely, the deal is scrapped and the Tories and DUP unite around a situation where May signs up to numerous piecemeal arrangements for things like customs checks and air travel before a"Hard Brexit" at the end of March 2019.

This will not be the apocalypse that so many Hard Remainers claim: we will not fall back to eating grass flavoured with the last packets of stockpiled bisto, though without question there will be many administrative problems and disruption especially to transport for several weeks or months.

What we will have is a Conservative regime though that will use the chaos to enact all manner of contingency legislation and regulations to dismantle a swathe of employment and consumer rights, privatise yet more or the state and possibly repress some of its opponents in the name of National Unity. May, her job done (she will say) will resign in May and Gove's hour will arrive.

Unless....

There is, in the next few weeks, a wide open chance for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour to drive not just a wedge between the Tories, but a stake into the heart of the Government. It would involve neither a General Election nor a second referendum.

What if Keir Starmer were to announce that, on reflection, while May's Deal doesn't meet Labour's six tests, the party recognises that, in the short time left, it is the best deal available and the only one that will both honour the referendum result and afford some protection to workers and consumers?

Doing this, rescuing May's deal, possibly with a few amendments, would leave the Prime Minister prisoner of Labour and drive Mogg and co out either to foment ceaseless rebellion within the Tories or alternatively to the netherworld of UKIP - whose own revival, now gaining some traction in the polls where they are back in third place though on just 8%, would also be spiked. May might linger on longer at Downing Street, but her government would be paralysed and the time would come when even she would know the game was up and support an early General Election. Labour would be in pole-position to dictate the terms of the ongoing negotiations for our new trading relationship with the EU (bear in mind that the current deal is only about how we leave, not the future arrangements) and by reaching out across the political divide would be seen a force for unity in this divisive time.

Politics is the art of the possible. And while all acts should always be guided by deep-rooted principle, much of the hot air of the last few days has not been for the sake of beliefs and ideals, but simply jostling for personal and/or party gain at what is one of the most critical moments for the UK since we joined the EEC back in 1973.

The electorate, on the other hand, seek simply a settlement: for now, none of the uncompromising politicians parading before the cameras this last week are likely to have infused anyone with what is needed above all - hope. Corbyn alone has the chance to do so, but the clock is ticking.

The Man Who Couldn't Be Bothered: Boris Johnson and the Lives of Others

Our country has been annexed into the Eton FPs' Form Room. A place where the Great and Good can play fast and loose with truth and lies - and with the rest of us. 

Boris Johnson's irresponsibility in first switching sides on the EU in a naked act of shameless self-promotion, and then running away from the consequences of his actions somehow sums up just how completely our pseudo-democracy is now the plaything of the rich.

It would of course come as no surprise to anyone watching Johnson at the press conference last Friday where he, Michael Gove and a token Labour person responded to the vote for Brexit. Here was a man who had won what he apparently wanted, a man who had got one over his prefect-room rival Dave Cameron in their lifelong existential struggle to captain the cricket team. (Cameron's own hubristic psychodrama has, of course, led in turn to his own not unwelcome undoing.)

Yet here too was a man rudely awoken to the dire crisis he has been personally deeply involved in creating - the need to extricate our country from the European Union with the huge economic, social and political ramifications of doing so. Quite aside from whether it will work or not, or how bad or not Brexit might be in the end, one thing was and remains absolutely certain.

Brexit will be a lot of hard work.

And when you come from a world of self-entitlement, where your early days were shaped wrecking restaurants and setting toilets on fire with your hooray-Henry mates, while good-old pater paid the bill, hard work is the last thing on your mind.

VL comment from Saturday

Johnson had foreseen a close vote but one that would have been for Remain. Then he could have continued to pose a threat to Cameron from the back benches. But he overplayed his hand and his decision, amidst yet more of his tiresomely pompous, lightweight Shakespeare-quoting bluster this morning, that he will not stand for Tory leader is nothing astonishing - yet nevertheless appalling in its sheer, self-centred gall.

This man has wrecked the social peace of Britain: he has been instrumental in unleashing forces that will be hard indeed to contain when it becomes clear that, whatever form of Brexit occurs, it will not solve the problems Johnson and his ilk have promised it would. He has tugged more too at the plug holding back a tide of ugly nationalism that may now burst across our Continent.

As blogged previously, as a historian (or at least someone who pretends to be), Johnson should have known better than his easy "EU-is-Hitler" analogies, his blatant lies about Turkey joining and his patent fakery in claiming to head some kind of anti-establishment insurgency. And same too his brazen willingess to deceive on the net contribution rate to the EU (exaggerating it by a factor of ten times) and his claim this could be spent on the NHS. That some people were willing to buy this snake oil is more a measure of their desparate alienation than of any significant talent on his part.

When he embraced Brexit, he should have thought about the potential for job losses in Sunderland and other non-Etonian places. Perhaps the people losing their livelihoods might not be able to ride the storm of economic uncertainty with quite the level of accumulated riches he and his mates have to tide themselves over. The economy, after its faltering recent unequal recovery, is now predicted to go into recession and contract by 1% next year according the Economist Intelligence Unit (one of those experts Johnson so often rubbished), with investment down 8% and the public spending deficit rising from 90% to 100% of gdp by 2018. Yet more austerity beckons, harming evermore the vulnerable, the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the very fabric of our society.

He should have thought about the license given to people ready to put notices through Polish people's letterboxes calling them vermin or tell a German born woman in her mid-eighties to go "home" after living here for fifty years with her late husband, leaving her scared to go out. Or the ones ready to daub "f--- off " slogans on a Polish centre, or firebomb a halal butcher's shop in Birmingham. Or, more widely, of the shot in the arm to the likes of the French Front National and eastern European neo-Nazis, all now clamouring to break up the EU and replace it with a brave new world of fortified borders and angry armies.

He should have thought about the young people who will not be able to access free university courses in the Netherlands or get jobs in Paris or Berlin. He should have thought about the half million British pensioners living in Spain and other Mediterranean states who will lose free healthcare and need to pay for insurance instead, so expensive in your later years.

He should have thought about them. All these people, all these lesser mortals without his privilege and innate sense of entitlement. He should have thought about the damage to their lives, the disruption and fear, the uncertainty that perhaps wasn't worth it as part of his pathetic game of besting David.

He should have thought about them. These ordinary, worried and confused British people.

But who wants tiresome details about the lives of others, of the mundane little people, when there's tennis to play and a good lunch to be eaten? And when one of his own Tory colleagues is quoted as saying Johnson would be too lazy to clean up his own vomit, why on earth would he take on the challenge of repairing our shattered country?

So, in the end, Boris just couldn't be bothered. On one level, we should be grateful for being spared more of him. Hopefully now he will fade in the shades; but our country is somehow all the poorer, diminished even, for the sake of this dilettante's infantile, jolly jape.

Sleepwalking the EU

 
The European Union referendum debate is sputtering slowly towards half-life. Still largely framed as a debate between two parts of the Tory Party, with echoing accompaniment from their familiars in UKIP and the remnants of the Lib Dems, it has to be so far the most turgid, depressive experience in recent political history. None of the aspiration and joy, or even the passion and anger, of the Scottish referendum or the US elections. Just a bunch of men in suits, accompanied by the odd woman in a suit, trying to outdo each other with predictions of our imminent demise if we leave, or if we stay.

In the Scottish referendum, the so-called Project Fear, where the Westminster parties combined to try to scare Scots into opposing independence, so insulted voters that there was a huge swing against remaining in the UK. In the final six weeks, support for independence grew by about 50% and the final result was infinitely closer than expected.

Bizarrely, the same parties that instigated the negative campaigning in Scotland have now adopted the same tactics for the Eurovote - the big difference being that this time it is being used by both sides. Consider tonight's Guardian debate which pitched Labour's Alan Johnson and Lib Dem Nick Clegg for "Remain" against UKIP's Nigel Farage and the Tory Alison Leadsom for "Leave".

The messaging was as appalling as the last few weeks' worst:

- Brexit will justify the break up of the UK with a new Scottish referendum (Johnson)
- The UK Government won't allow the Scots to have another vote (Leadsom)
- Britain's security is at threat if we don't leave because of a combination of a European Army and poverty-stricken Turkey being allowed to join (Farage)
- Nigel Farage is "deeply, deeply dishonest" (Clegg)
- Nick Clegg has made a living out of telling lies (Farage)

Even the options on the paper - Remain or Leave - are somehow uninspiring. Should I remain or should I leave?  as the song never went.

The polls are bouncing around, and this is not surprising - voters are unclear of the issues because the politicians and the media are so used to simply printing and echoing horror stories about abroad that there is little ability to have any informed debate. The most progressive elements of the Remain camp, especially the trade unions, talk about the EU granting workers rights, and this is correct in the sense that a lot of employment law such as equal pay, anti-discrimination and health and safety rules is derived from EU regulations and directives.

However, implicit in the agreement signed up to by Cameron is an even greater ability than before for Britain to opt-out of many of these (as we have already over swathes of the working time regulations, for example) as well as a commitment to sign up to the appalling TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership treaty (TTIP). Both provisions significantly threaten the rights we have gained.

But on the Leave side there is equal dishonesty - they say we can leave and have a trade agreement with the EU which will somehow inevitably continue to trade with us, ignoring the fact that, as with all trade agreements, we would need to sign up to many of the same rules we apparently detest now but without having any say in them at all. Norway even pays billions a year to the EU for the privilege of trading with it while not a member.

Neither side to date has either given a compelling argument. The remain side largely ignores the positives - such as the record-breaking length of time the Continent that started two world wars has now enjoyed peace; we may haggle over budgets but no one is shooting at each other. Or the fact that freedom of movement has allowed millions of Britons to live in the EU as well as permitted Europeans to come to Britain. Some half million UK pensioners live in Spain and enjoy its free health service as a right. Similarly, the urgent international action required to tackle global warming has a headstart with an international institution like the EU acting as a springboard for action.

Equally, the Leave side could talk about Britain out of the EU developing more localised economies and strengthening rather than diluting workers and consumers rights - except that its leaders are pretty hostile to these things and detest the minimal rules the EU requires now.

So, in the coming weeks, it has to be hoped that the campaigns improve, lift their sights and provide some vision of the future that might get people along to vote - and more than that, think about the future. The Scottish referendum was noted for its massive engagement of people, on both sides, in an unprecedented way. But as things stand, it is not impossible that the biggest group in the EU vote will be the non-voters and, whatever the result of the ballot, the issue will remain unsettled.

Corbyn's Labour Party is silent as it increasingly turns inward. The Greens, by contrast, have produced a fairly optimistic video in support of remaining, though perhaps they could be doing a bit more to talk about the sort of EU they would like to build rather than fairly uncritically lauding the pretty messy and undemocratic structures we have now. The SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, meantime, has been a constructive voice for a more informed debate, but even she is talking more about the benefits of the status quo than what needs to change to benefit citizens' rather than big business interests.

Sleepwalking in or out of the European Union may not be the issue - the neoliberals and the banks remain the winners. The issue, as ever, is how we break past them and start to build a new, fairer, sustainable society - nationally and internationally. The different Europe of Varoufakis, not the corporate straight-jacket of Cameron, or Farage.

The Man Who Stares at Groats - positive currency for Scotland's Future

Salmond and the ancient Scots groat

The Scottish Government has today launched a far reaching white paper, Scotland's Future, outlining its plans for a new, independent country if Scottish voters say Yes next September. In a polished performance, as well as presenting the proposed constitutional settlement and complex division of assets and liabilities between Scotland and the remainder of the United Kingdom, First Minister Alex Salmond and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, outlined a range of key policy objectives should the SNP be successfully elected as the government of a newly independent country.

The SNP's plans are mildly left of centre, with economic growth at the heart of their plans for a settlement along a vaguely Scandinavian type model of mixed ownership and social welfare - an objective probably reflecting the broad political consensus within Scotland but something increasingly alien to the gradually harsher, neoliberal approach of the two and a half main parties south of the border.

Controversially, the paper includes retaining a currency union with the rest of the UK and keeping the pound sterling as Scotland's currency. This may be driven by the SNP seeking to reassure voters that independence will not create some new alien world with a return to the ancient Scottish coinage of the groat but it leaves a post-independence Scotland somewhat beholden to the economic policies of its much larger neighbour, precisely the recipe for disaster that has racked the European Union in recent years. What if, as does not seem unlikley, an independent Scottish Government wishes to follow an expansionist policy while London continues to opt for austerity? There is little doubt which piper would call the tune and Scotland's independence in economics at least would be curtailed as a result.

Independent countries are most successful if they have independent currencies - and of Scotland's Scandinavian comparators, only Finland has yielded to the Euro. Sweden, Denmark and Norway, two inside and the other outside the EU, thrive by their own currencies, while the remarkable turnaround in Iceland's economy since the disaster of 2009 would not have been possible without its sovereignty on currency (as well as a Green - Left government). A Scottish currency is a key part of the Scottish Green Party's egalitarian pro-independence platform, lauched by MSPs Patrick Harvie and Alison Johnstone a couple of weeks ago. (Q&A video with Patrick Harvie below.)

There is little doubt Scotland could function very well indeed as an independent state and given the increasing cultural and political divergence between Scotland and, in particular, the dominant "middle England", there is no compelling reason to remain in a union which few south of the border are particularly bothered about. If the unionists' call north of Gretna is Better Together, their southern equivalent, were there one, could as easily be titled Couldn't Care Less.

The narrow and mean-minded approach of the unionist camp - denouncing currency union as fantasy when they had previously endorsed it and running on a ceaseless tirade of abuse towards Alex Salmond in particular - does little to enhance its case. It lacks vision and seems bereft of any emotional connection with the debate, trading often dubiously constructed figures about fiscal changes and bizarre stories about not being able to see Dr Who on the TV, rather than addressing any positive reasons for remaining in union. Its harsh rebuttal of the white paper before it was even published will do little to help its case just as some polls seem to show the gap between the two sides narrowing slightly. If the Coalition Government and Labour unionists remain as stridently intransigent on opposing currency union, it is to be hoped the SNP does the logical thing which it should have done in the first place and moves to a separate Scottish currency as the only choice remaining given the blatant ill will of the UK parties. It would be a massive error to nail their colours to the mast on a union with entities that don't reciprocate.

In the meantime, there are over 600 pages to read, available here, and ten months of campaigning to go. For Scottish expats like myself, south of the border for some years, it will be an interesting time guaging the impact of the debate on the rest of the country - the commonly held, but rather incorrect, view being that Scotland is subsidised by the English taxpayer (Scotland actually contributes more tax per head than the rest of the UK and receives significantly less than Londoners and many parts of the north of England).

With the rightwing media portraying Scotland as a burden to the rest of the UK, this line of argument no matter how incorrect may nevertheless become more of an issue south of the border in the run up to September. In the event of a No vote, then, as the Coalition's Secretary of State for Scotland has indicated, there may well be some move to change the public funding for Scotland in the long established Barnett formula, which sets funding for Scottish services. Consequently, having voted against independence after being told it would be economically damaging, Scots may then face being economically damaged by Westminster in any case.

So, the choice may become starker still - who do people in Scotland have confidence in most : an increasingly remote, centralist Government in Westminster; or themselves?

Scottish and Wry...

David Cameron, George Osborne and Muppet-in-Chief Danny "Beaker" Alexander have managed to get themselves totally twisted and hoist on their own petard today over the prospect of a Scottish independence referendum. Concerned about the plans by the SNP Scottish Government to play a long game of slowly building up to a referendum in 2014, with a multiple choice of status quo, more devolution within the UK and total independence, they have decided to bring forward legislation to force the vote to be held sooner.

Citing secret discussions between Cameron and Osborne and "global business leaders", the Con Dems have warned any further delay will damage the Scottish economy and, for alleged clarity, the punters are to be given only two choices - yes or no to independence.

Beaker and Osborne - taking Britain forward to oblivion

It is testimony to the total ineptitude of the so-called unionist parties that by their actions they have completely validated the SNP's claims of central government ignoring the wishes of the Scots - who voted in large numbers for the majority SNP Government, which had made its referendum plans clear - and have almost certainly hastened the break up of the UK.

So which is the worst piece of amateur, overgrown schoolboy brinkmanship? :
- Westminster politicians from the Tories and Lib Dems, both of whom were comprehensively routed in the Scottish elections, with the latter pretty close to the wipe out zone, lecturing the elected government in Scotland on when it is to hold a vote? And besides, didn't both these parties vehemently oppose calls by then  Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander to call the SNP's bluff and hold a "bring it on" independence referendum four years ago? Had they supported her then, the issue might have been voted down for a generation. Now, they just look deeply interfering to the point of bullying; and with no small whiff of despair in their deeds.

- Cameron and Osborne declaring that the vote on the future of Scotland (and indeed, the entire UK, by default) should be held on a timetable dictated by big business?  It may have escaped their notice, but now is perhaps not the best time to cite the grasping pirate captains of capitalism as the motivating factor behind your cause.

- Cameron, Osborne and Beaker thinking it is clever to deny people a third option of enhanced devolution, presumably calculating that by doing so, enough devolutionists will baulk at all-out independence and opt for the status quo. Dave Cameron's old University mate and former President of Oxford Uni Tories, BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson, obligingly spouting the latest Downing Street cheat sheet, suggested this morning that a multiple ballot wouldn't be possible because "no one would know which option had won" if none got more than 50% of the vote. Presumably the Lib Dems haven't got round to explaining AV to the Tories; oh, sorry, bad language...

- Changing the law to make any referendum result binding, unlike all the other referenda held in the UK, which have been consultative. Presumably they are gambling that the apparent finality of a binding referendum might scare some people off voting for change.

- Cameron, Osborne and Beaker saying anything at all about Scottish independence. After all, what better advert for Edinburgh breaking away from the union is there than a reminder that these smug people, with little support among Scottish voters, are still ultimately in charge?

I am a Scot, living in England. I am no nationalist of any type and no advocate of independence. But after this amateurish farrago of blatant political fixing, which these pathetic irridentists seem so blindly determined on pursuing, I can only feel that the day the Saltire is hauled above a fully independent Scottish Parliament has come much closer - and, for the first time in my life, I really wouldn't be in disagreement with a basically social democratic country that wants to cut its ties with the junta that is driving Britain to the neoliberal dogs.

Democracy - Time for Starting Over?

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly found in democracy, they will be best attained when all alike share in Government to the utmost."  - Aristotle, philosopher, Athens (384 to 322 BC).

Democracy come to Westminster in "V for Vendetta"

Tonight, in the British House of Commons, a farce unfolded, the latest of many to besmirch the self-proclaimed Mother of Parliaments (the moniker itself an utter denial of historical reality). Barely two months ago, the Coalition Government, loftily proclaiming its desire for a new, open democracy and keen to show its embracing of the twitterati, created its E-petitions website. Aside from crashing on its first day as a stampede of would-be hangmen rushed to ask Parliament to restore the gallows, the idea of the website was to introduce a direct link between People and Parliament to counter the widespread cynicism and disillusion about the political process. If your petition gets 100,000 signatures, it "could" be debated in the House of Commons.

But today, this would-be return to the Agora (where the Athenian progenitors of democracy gathered in the citizens' assembly to debate and vote on anything they liked) has fallen at the first fence. Although tonight's debate on whether to hold a referendum on Britain's continued membership of the European Union was not a direct result of an epetition, it came just days after one calling for precisely the same thing passed the 100,000 signature mark.

E-petitions: how it doesn't work...

And how did our Masters respond? Why, they huffed that it was entirely the wrong time to discuss membership of the EU. Prime Minister Cameron, referring to the Eurozone crisis, today likened to proposal as akin to walking away from your neighbour's burning house rather than helping to put the fire out - although at least one neighbour would like Dave to keep his sand-buckets to himself. 

Ignoring opinion polls showing that two-thirds of voters want a referendum sometime soon, the three main party leaders imposed a three-line whip to compel MPs to vote down the motion or face serious consequences to their careers. And they duly did so, by 483 to 111 votes, albeit with a very large Tory revolt. So much for direct democracy - you can have it when we say you can. Socrates, a master of procedure himself, would have been given his cup of hemlock years earlier had he tried that out in the Agora.

And yet this doublespeak about reconnecting the rulers with the ruled is far from confined to the epetition scam. Cameron has played a clever game over the bloated cost of our MPs not by clamping down further on their expenses, which are back at pre-scandal levels, but rather by cutting their numbers from 650 to just 600 - approximately one MP for every 100,000 people. These must be in constituencies of nearly identical size, regardless, it seems, of the impact on the integrity of local communities and how their interests are to be represented.

On Saturday, I met with a Green Party colleague from our neighbouring city of Wakefield to look at how the boundary changes will affect us - my home town of Dewsbury, long represented in the Commons by its own MP, is being split up, with one part linked to Wakefield, which is split in three. Numbers count, not communities. And consequently, people will become ever further alienated from our legislators.

One underplayed feature of this supposed numerical rebalancing of representation is that the Government Cabinet is significantly strengthened in its hold over the Commons. The Government has the Payroll Vote - these are the 140 or so MPs who, as well as being MPs, also hold paid jobs in the Government as Ministers at one level or another. In votes like the one on the European referendum, they are considerably more reliable and loyal to the line decided by the Prime Minister as he has them by the money. If the Cabinet can start out with 140 votes it is nearly half way towards a majority in any vote in a Commons of 600 than one of 650. And so a measure presented as increasing democracy in Parliament is, in fact, one which centralises power even more in the hands of the Government elite and party leaderships.

Even more troubling are the Coalition's plans (steered by the oddly self-sacrificing Nick Clegg) to change electoral registration laws, relaxing the legal requirement to register and removing the obligation on local authorities to ensure that people sign up. It creates a situation where British electoral law will be similar to the pre-civil rights era in many American states, with fears that, as happened in the USA, many marginalised people, the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities and elderly, will disappear from the voters' roll. Up to ten million voters, about 30% of the total, may drop off the register, MPs were warned - and guess which party will be least affected?

Demokratios - the rule of the people in Athens' Agora

The Coalition Agreement promises to extend transparency in political life and devolve power from central government to communities, but unsurprisingly, the political class is ensuring that any light that is shone on its murky hold over the rest of society is well filtered through the most opaque of prisms. The Liam Fox scandal showed how brazenly Ministers collude with fee-paying, contract-seeking lobbyists, yet the vigorous defence of Fox's behaviour by many Tories was matched only by the silence from Labour benches - no one rocked the leaky boat too much.

Of course, our leaders smugly think that all this will work, that people will buy it. Maybe even some politicians buy it in their own heads, reassuring themselves that they are still beloved of the nation. "Hey, what's up, I'm with you guys," a thoroughly deluded Colonel Gaddafi allegedly told his captors this week, moments before they shot him. Maybe he had listened to too many focus groups.

Our politicians may sneer at demonstrations like Occupy London Stock Exchange. They may think if they suggest the tents put off tourists or (as the dreadful Louise Mensche attempted) claim the protesters are hypocrites if they buy a Starbucks latte that somehow the status quo will prevail. Perhaps, for now, it will, but it may be a Pyrrhic success, a hollow victory which will leave the Commons as nothing but a teetering house of cards. Perhaps St Paul's and the open meetings of Occupy show we can yet return to the Agora and leave behind the jaded, gauche Victorian monstrosity that is the Palace of Westminster.

A Europe for People, Not Profit

On Monday, the British Parliament will debate and vote on a motion sponsored by eurosceptic Conservative MPs to hold a referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union. In the midst of the Eurozone crisis, while David Cameron has insisted on a three line whip to keep his fractious right-wingers in line and the Lib Dems will vote against, even although their leader proposed an in-or-out referendum in 2008. But with as many as 85 Conservatives predicted to be ready to break that line, the Coalition will almost certainly need - and get - Labour Party support to vote the proposal down.

And so it is very unlikely that the British people will get a referendum - even although most of them want one. So much for democracy and so much for the three parties that dominate our political world continue to disconnect further and further from the electorate they govern.

The European project was born in the aftermath of the two world wars that dominated the Continent during the first part of the 20th century. The worst conflicts in human history originated in her heartlands. From that perspective, for now at any rate, the EU has played a positive role - with the dreadful exception of the former Yugoslavia, the hot air of Presidents, Prime Ministers and bureaucrats has replaced the guns of Krupps and the Birmingham Small Arms Company.

Yet the absence of war cannot in itself justify the failures of the behemoth that the European Union has become - while its bureaucracy is not quite the bloated gravy train so beloved of the British tabloid writers, the Eurozone project has brought misery to millions of ordinary people as the European Central Bank, like banks everywhere, continues to put the interests of international finance ahead of the needs of European citizens. In other respects too, EU policy focus is very much on encouraging and protecting big business and its decision-making processes are remote and unaccountable to ordinary citizens.

Of course, listening to the Tory and UKIP eurosceptics railing about Europe taking over Britian, including  blatantly lying about straight bananas (why does no one ever wonder where these are?), their reasons for wanting a referendum soon become clear. They accept that Europe is a vital trade partner for Britain, plus perhaps they worry about having to accommodate the half a million or so angry British pensioners who would lose their right of abode in Spain, plus the 200,000 Britons in France who would be heading back to our shores.

Euromyths - according to legend, all our bananas should look like this.

So what do they want instead? A renegotiated relationship - some of them argue for a sort of club class membership, while others want to be completely outside but with special privileges of access.

What these people object to are the regulations that ensure some degree of common social protection and health and safety rules around Europe, so that one country can't undercut another by paying its workers miniscule wages and forcing them to work in dangerous conditions. The EU has for two decades been the main proponent of new safety legislation in the workplace - if it wasn't for the EU, British workers would have no entitlement to a 20 minute unpaid break after six hours of working; pregnant women would not be entitled to protective arrangements for using computer screens; and employers would not have to consult their workers before moving their jobs out of the UK. Small protections and far from ideal, but better than nothing. This is what the right-wingers in the Tories and UKIP are really fretting about - the impact on capitalists profit margins of the marginal improvements in workers conditions through European legislation.

But these motives aside, it is time to have a proper debate on the EU and vote on whether Britain remains in it. It is welcome that the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas MP, has put forward an amendment to the referendum proposal calling for a national vote on whether the EU should become more democratically accountable and economic powers be devolved back to nation states. By default, this should mean the ending of the ludicrous straight-jacket that is the Euro - if Greece still had the drachma, the current financial crisis would have far less impact.

We need multinational institutions like the EU to be able to tackle the global crisis of climate change - no one country can fight that alone. And in a globalised world where so many international corporations operate above and beyond the writ of any national governments, it is only international public and democratically accountable bodies that will ever have any hope of taming the damage they are doing. But in parallel, the Union needs to focus on the needs of its member societies rather than the desires of  international capital.

The European Economic Community emerged from the gound breaking coal and steel community forged between the former enemies France and Germany just months after Hitler's demise. If its founding purpose of ensuring that European will never again fight European is to be secured, the Union must be one for the people of our Continent and the wider world. If it is run instead for the rich, for the owners of the multinationals, then there will be no social peace and in the absence of a democratic, social Europe, as competition over increasingly scarce resources becomes ever fiercer, the gun factories may soon be taking new orders once more.

Europe past, or Europe future?

The Cats Have It - AV Explained More Clearly than Humans Could Do It!

This Yes to AV video explains how the Alternative Vote would work; how it is more democratic; and how the Conservatives use a form of it to elect their leader, but don't want to extend the same privilege to us when electing our MPs.

The No Campaign does have the support of many Labour MPs, but is funded and run in effect by the Conservative Party, which has a clearly vested interest in keeping the current system. This allowed Thatcher to do her work even although she never enjoyed the support of more than 43% of the people - just think, if the Yes to AV campaign only gets 43% of the vote in the referendum, it will be characterised as having been soundly defeated. But Thatcher enjoyed a landslide victory in the 1983 election with just 42% of the vote; and Tony Blair was elected in 2005 with just 35%!

My local MP sits in Parliament with 65% of those who voted having picked other candidates. The current system is clearly flawed and undemocratic. The Alternative Vote is not perfect, nor is it proportional, but it would mean that MPs have to have the support of over 50% of those voting - so a big improvement on now.

Vote Yes to change on Thursday!

Making Votes Count: The Norwich South Question

In a democracy, supposedly everyone counts equally - my vote is supposed to have the same value as anyone else's. Otherwise, it wouldn't be democratic, would it? If my vote was worth eight times more than someone else's, it would hardly seem fair,equal or democratic. Who could reasonably argue with that?

Yet in Britain in 2010, a Labour supporter's vote was eight times more valuable than a Green Party voter's. And while Labour won a seat for every 33,000 votes polled and the Conservatives for every 35,000, it took 111,000 for the Lib Dems to win each of their seats. Depending on the analysis, somewhere between 15.7 million and 21 million of the 29.5 million people who voted, simply wasted their time going to the polling station because, in the end, their votes counted for nothing.

If it was Zimbabwe or Iran or Venezuela, there would be an international outcry. Sanctions would be called for, the perpetrators of such grossly undemocratic methods denounced on the international stage. But, in Britain, for once after a few days of negotiations, the Queen simply appointed a new Government and things carried on.

Well, on 5 May, Britain will have a referendum on whether or not to change the voting system that allows this calumny. We can choose to move away from the current "first-past-the-post" system, where whichever candidate in a given area wins more votes than any other individual candidate is elected. Superficially, this may seem alright, until you reflect on the fact that as we live in a multi-party system, this means nearly all of our Members of Parliament have been elected with more people voting against them rather than for them - their victory has come about purely because they have been the largest minority.



Winning Where? 71% of voters opposed this winning MP.

 As a result, at the last election, of 650 MPs elected, 432 had more voters supporting other candidates than supported themselves. Over two thirds of our MPs are not mandated by a majority of the people who voted in their constituencies - 111 MPs were elected with less than 40% of the vote in their area, with the lowest "winner" of all being Lib Dem Simon Wright in Norwich South, who represents his area with just 29% of the vote - 71% of the local voters chose others, but go unrepresented, their votes wasted in the "first-past-the-post" lottery.

The track record nationally is just as abysmal. Labour were elected in 2005 with over 55% of the seats on just 35% of the national vote. In February 1974, the Conservatives won more votes than Labour, but fewer seats and so lost; while back in 1951 it was the other way round - Labour actually won 200,000 votes more but 26 MPs fewer than the Conservatives. In the 1983 election, Margaret Thatcher gained a seat for every 11,000 votes she lost and the Tories were declared victorious by a landslide - with just 42% of the vote.

There are alternatives: different forms of proportional representation (PR) are used in every European country - even in Berlusconi's Italy after a brief flirtation with the British system. PR systems are also used for the London Assembly, the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislatures and Scottish local councils.These ensure that as far as possible, the number of seats won by parties are of a similar proportion to the votes cast in the election. So 40% of the vote gets around the same proportion of seats.

Depending on the system used, the degree of proportionality varies, and some have links to local areas, some have none, some have a mix. The former SDP leader, Roy Jenkins, proposed a mixed system for Britain back in 2001, but after commissioning Jenkins' Report, then PM Blair chose to ignore its findings. Consequently, when the Lib Dems held the balance of power after the last election, the betting was that they would demand such a system to be introduced in return for supporting a new Government.

As it was, they settled for less - much less. The anti-reform Conservatives conceded a referendum on the system known as the Alternative Vote (AV). This is not a proportional voting system and can distort national results almost as much as our current system. So most electoral reformers were sorely disappointed that the Lib Dems backed down so easily and totally. Many have indicated they will not support AV in the referendum and, even if they reluctantly vote for it, they certainly won't be out campaigning.

The disappointment is understandable and justified. But given that AV is all we have on the table, perhaps those supporting genuine reform need to be careful about opposing it, especially as the right wing media will portray a defeat as a decisive vote against any form of PR as well. Although it is decidedly not PR and not what genuine democrats want, AV is an improvement on what we have. This is because AV works by people ranking candidates in a constituency in order of preference, 1.2.,3. etc, instead of the current X. When the 1st preference votes are counted, if the top candidate has less than 50% of all the votes cast, the bottom candidate is eliminated and their votes redistributed according to the 2nd preferences of their voters. This process continues until the top candidate has over 50% of the votes cast and is declared elected.

It is very straightforward, uncomplicated and, in spite of blatant lies from its opponents about it costing £250 million, it would add only marginally to the costs of elections. It retains the constituency link for MPs and it also removes the so called "wasted vote" dilemma where many voters have to vote to stop someone being elected rather than for the candidate of their choice. The advantage of AV is that they could vote for their preferred candidate with their first preference and then put their second preference, and so on, next to someone else, knowing that their vote would not be "wasted". This would undoubteldy lead to much greater freedom for people to vote for different parties and perhaps begin to challenge the established system more effectively. And then we might see moves towards more proportional systems.

There are better systems than AV, but in their absence it is hard to see why anyone would prefer our current process over it other than those with a vested interest: and the fact that tonight members of the unelected House of Lords are doing all they can to sabotage the referendum is a disgrace of Mugabe-esque proportions. How dare these placemen seek to set conditions on democracy!

The logic of opposing AV is that it is acceptable for the MP for Norwich South to be elected with just 29% of the vote. The 71% voting against him do not count.

So the question for the "NO" campaign is this - if it is acceptable for this man to sit as an MP with such a low vote, would you be willing to accept that the "yes to AV" campaign could win the referendum with just 29% of the vote?

No, I didn't think so.

END THIS NONSENSE - ALTERNATIVE VOTE WOULD DESTROY THE "WASTED VOTE" TACTIC AND BRING GENUINE REFORM NEARER.