Ryanair - I literally can't make it up.

From my blog post on 25 June exposing a corporate wanker train manager:

"why not have [the commuters] standing up on short-haul flights as well? I'm surprised Ryanair hasn't thought of that one."

From today's Telegraph:

Ryanair is considering proposals to make some of its passengers stand during flights.

Why not just strap the poor bastards to the underside of the wings and get on with it?

When the EU becomes a fascist dictatorship somewhere down the line it won't be run by Tony Blair or Berlusconi - it'll be run by Michael f***ing O'Leary. There's no goddamn way I'm standing up on a plane. Even getting up to go to the loo is a major ordeal. He can stick his planes - I'll take the nationalised trains instead.

More homophobes hiding behind the Cross

You've seen the Tories shacking up with the anti-gay movement in Poland; now it's time to say hello to the UK version. The "Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans" (crap name by the way) is anti-same sex unions, anti-gay priests; in short, religion for the 19th century, at the latest.

If I was running the Church of England (unlikely!) I'd have no truck with these guys (and all the leaders are of course guys, as they're the same people who don't like women priests, being sexist as well as homophobic. At least they're not racist; the leader is Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester). The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is too nice to these people. I guess he wants to keep church attendances up come what may, but surely the toleration of a huge number of reactionary bigots is too high a price to pay? The same thing happened at Millwall FC in the 70s when they turned a blind eye to football hooliganism because the attendances were high.

What makes me laugh about people like the FCA is that they act like the victims when in fact they are the oppressors. They're waging a war against gay people - not the other way round. I suspect for many regular churchgoers the schism in the Anglican church can't come soon enough. Would you be comfortable going to services knowing that you were in the same building as some of these reactionaries? Probably not.

Unity of religious belief is wildly overrated - most obviously by big religious organisations like the Roman Catholic Church, but the Church of England is another example. There needs to be freedom to dissent and to disagree, rather than some ridiculous show of unity for the cameras. I would be most comfortable attending a church with one member - myself. (And even then, I couldn't rule out a schism).

Ecclestone does a Bowie

Formula One rights holder Bernie Ecclestone, always an idiot, has surpassed himself with recent comments on British politics: that democracy has failed in Britain, that Adolf Hitler was "a man who was able to get things done", and that he prefers strong leaders - like Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, or indeed his friend Max Mosley, who presumably got the idea from his grandad Oswald.

These are very much along the same lines as interview comments made by David Bowie in the mid-1970s that Britain needed a fascist dictatorship. Bowie at least has the excuse that he was coked out of his box at the time. I'm not sure if the same is true of Ecclestone, but in essence, who gives a shit?

Ecclestone also defended low tax rates for high earners like Lewis Hamilton (who is nowadays a Swiss tax exile), as if "offers an incentive". I'd like to impose a 105% tax rate (say) on Bernie Ecclestone, as it would "offer an incentive" for him to f*** off to Switzerland and set up a fascist dictatorship there, if he so chooses.

Hello darling, I'm on the *nationalised* train

Writing this on the, for want of a better word, British Rail - formerly National Express East Coast - train on the way from London to Newcastle, and I must say it's great to be back on the nationalised trains after all this time. Look, even the wi-fi's working.

You'll probably have seen this already if you're based in the UK as it's been all over the news, but yesterday talks between NXEC and the Department of Transport over a possible renegotiation of the East Coast rail franchise broke down. NXEC were meant to be paying the DfT £1.4bn over the 10 years' duration of the franchise but this was based on passenger forecasts that were optimistic to begin with, and as the recession bit, it became clear that NXEC was going to run a massive loss. Hence, the government had to step in to keep those goddamn trains running.

Whose fault is this? Well, really a combination of National Express (for making a reckless franchise bid) and the Government (for accepting that reckless bid in the first place). As a monopoly operator of the East Coast rail route, NXEC could expect to make substantial profits under normal economic conditions, but even so, £1.4bn is a hell of a lot for the govt to cream off from the railway. And environmentally it makes no sense whatsover - we should be subsidising the railways to get more people out of their cars and reduce overall CO2 emissions. (Network Rail, the infrastructure operator, does receive a subsidy but this is not enough to offset the East Coast franchise premium payments.

Of course, National Express have tried to weasel out of their liabilities for defaulting on the contract by claiming that NXEC is a separate company to the rest of the National Express group and so their liability should not extend into the rest of the company. For example, they argue that the Government shouldn't be able to take over the other 2 franchises that National Express runs (National Express East Anglia and C2C, which runs the Southend to London Fenchurch St line) as compensation for NXEC's failure. This is blatant financial engineering by National Express to try to swindle money out of the taxpayer by any means possible, and if necessary the Government should make retrospective changes to corporate law to make parent companies liable for losses incurred by fully owned subsidiaries so that National Express can't get away with this.

I'd be very happy to see the back of National Express on the East Anglia rail service as well. They deliberately run trains with fewer carriages despite overcrowding to save money on fuel costs. They have imposed progressively more ludicrous evening ticket restrictions to stop people travelling on cheap tickets in the evening rush hour - again to save money instead of running longer trains, which is what people really want. And they deliberately fail to advertise the Network Railcard, which provides 1/3 off off-peak fares, in case people find out about it and save money. F*** them.

And full marks to Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis - not my favourite politician at all most days - for standing firm in the face of National Express's attempts to renegotiate their franchise just because of the recession. Adonis reasoned - correctly - that if he gave way on this franchise it would open the floodgates and every other two-bit rail operator would be hammering on the door for the soft treatment. He did The Right Thing.

But he plans to re-franchise to a private operator as soon as possible, which is a pain. There have been some improvements to the rail rolling stock under private ownership, it's true (although that was partly the result of a dreadful lack of investment under British Rail, which was starved of cash from its inception in the 1940s). The crappy old slam-door trains are long gone, which we can all be grateful for. But in most other respects, privatisation has been a disastrous failure. Lack of maintenance caused a sequence of dreadful crashes and disasters - Hatfield, Potters Bar, Ealing, etc. - and forced the nationalisation of Railtrack (Steve Byers's finest hour!) Fares have rocketed sky-high, especially for people who want to buy their ticket on the day of travel. And investment in new lines and tracks - Eurostar excluded - has been piecemeal. The recession presents an ideal opportunity to bring public enterprise back to the railways and Labour would be best advised to grab it with both hands. At the very least, a pledge to renationalise would provide a clear dividing line with the Tories at the next election (unless Cameron copies it, which is very possible.)

Train companies love to crowd us into corporate fascism

The latest wanker train boss to suggest that as they are extorting ludicrous sums of money from commuters, it's OK for them to stand up all the way, is Keith "Rude Boy" Ludeman of Go-Ahead group. Suck on this quote:

"It is not unreasonable to expect some one to stand, this is a mass transit system. If you're coming up from the coast you might expect to get a seat, but your chances are reduced closer to London."

And why are your chances reduced closer to London? Because Go-Ahead doesn't run enough trains to cope with demand, that's why. Because it can make more profit by running less trains while charging people the same fares.

These are the sort of people who would presumably say it's OK for people to stand up in hospital when they're waiting for operations. Why not have them standing up on short-haul flights as well? I'm surprised Ryanair hasn't thought of that one.

I've even seen loads of people standing up going in from Chelmsford to Liverpool Street on Saturdays - which is nobody's idea of peak time. It's all because the companies want to put less and less trains on.

I think if people have to stand up on journeys they should get a fare or season ticket discount. Easy to police (given the number of CCTV cameras) and would provide an incentive for train companies to actually run enough trains to stop giving out discounts to standing passengers.

Meanwhile, Keith "Rude Boy" (who no doubt gets a chauffeur-driven limo with plenty of legroom) should be forced to spend his whole life standing up. No seats at home or work, made to commute on a cattle truck train, even his bed should be one of those Japanese upright "pod" thingies. Let's see how he likes it. It's time to make a stand. (Dreadful, I know.)

"Green shoots" last as long as my salad

A funny thing, the global economy. A month ago, all the talk was of green shoots and how we'd turned the corner. Now, a slew of awful data from the US - see, for instance, dreadful unemployment figures - and equally dire news from the UK where mortgage lending appears to be falling again - and suddenly stock markets are falling again and we're all doomed.

In a way the efforts of some of the media to put a brave face on it are worse than the scaremongers. When the BBC runs a positive story saying that the US economy is doing better because the annualised growth figures were revised from minus 5.7% to minus 5.5%, you know things are very bad.

What's the lesson to take from this? Don't read too much into one or two months' good statistics, or the wave of pundits trying to convince you that the good times are back. In reality, all that the US and UK governments have achieved so far (the Europeans have been rubbish because the European Central Bank are clueless 19th century economists) is to stop things being much worse than they are. But that does not mean that things are going to improve markedly any time soon.

We have some salad growing in the garden which we're now keeping under netting because earlier in the summer when we grew it in the open, when green shoots appeared they were eaten or displaced by birds. A good analogy for the economy.

If you look back at the media for even the worst recessions that the global economy has had - the 1930s, the mid-1970s and the early 1980s - there was always an army of pundits trying to tell you that we'd turned the corner. Eventually, of course, they will be right (hopefully; if not, we're stuffed). But for now, they are mainly talking bilge.

If you have to read pundits, read Paul Krugman, Larry Elliott, or Adam Lent in the TUC's Touchstone blog. They get it right more than most. If you are on the Right (or on the Left but want to know what intelligent members of the opposition are thinking), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is yer man. There are others as well - I'm enjoying a blog called Labour and Capital which someone gave me a tip-off about in a meeting last week. At some point I should round up these useful commentators onto an economics blogroll - it's just getting the time to do it. Hopefully some time over the summer (that's what I always say).

Some evidence that John Bercow is the man for the job...

...is that Simon Heffer hates him.

Now admittedly, that doesn't narrow down the choice of Speaker very much, since Simon Heffer hates a great many people, including hundreds of MPs. But the Heff is like an inverse political weathervane: when he's advocating one course of action, if you do the precise opposite you'll normally be all right. He's a very useful guide to what NOT to think.

Currently blog posts are being done at about 6am on a daily basis in the brief period between waking up and getting on with work - a lot on my plate at the moment. But better to have a brief post daily than nothing at all, I guess (I'm sure Royal Mail advocates exactly the same principle - a brief post, every day.)

Good choice but why spoil it with silliness?

Of the Speaker candidates, John Bercow, who won last night, looked like the best of a rather dull bunch. On the extreme left of the Tory party - targeted as a possible defector at times, but probably too left-wing to be comfortable with New Labour (the same phrase was also used by early 1990s late night TV stalwart Jerry Hayes, who was the MP for Harlow until he got bitten by a dog, punched, and finally voted out in the ill-fated election campaign of 1997. But I digress...)

For sure, Bercow hasn't been the most consistent figure in UK politics... but when your initial views put you in the far-right Monday Club, maybe inconsistency is to be encouraged? He stands a good chance of doing well in the post, although in the event of a Tory majority at the next election, deposition looks likely... the Conservatives really hate him. Perhaps because he is a real liberal rather than a fake one.

It was something of a comedown, then, that the brave new era for British politics began... exactly like the old era, with the Speaker being "reluctantly dragged" to the chair, as if he was doing everybody a favour. Really, this kind of overgrown prep school nonsense should be abandoned at the earliest opportunity. Along with all the crap about the correct form of address - "the honourable member" and all that balls. MPs should just be called by name, like in any other walk of life. The more we demystify and de-clutter political procedures, the more chance there is that they might make sense to the vast majority of people rather than seeming like some weird 18th century ritual.

Tradition always has been a dirty word as far as I'm concerned. Greg Dyke was right all along, as were The Clash... "Cut The Crap".

The Speaker should not be an MP

Parliament continues to limp on through a storm of bad publicity: now, apparently, party whips are putting pressure on MPs to vote for particular candidates for speaker: in the case of Labour MPs, that is Margaret Beckett.

The fact that MPs are being approached by whips over what is supposedly a "non-partisan" choice is unfortunate, but there is a deeper problem here. MPs are fundamentally a political animal. And yet the Speaker, who is an MP, is supposed to be impartial. These two criteria are so obviously incompatible that it's amazing that anyone thinks there won't be tensions of this kind. If nothing else, having a speaker who is also an MP deprives his or her constituents of their right to proper democratic (political) representation.

The obvious solution would be to have a speaker who is not an MP, but some kind of appointee. Obviously an appointed position would carry a risk of partiality; to get round this, I'd recommend that the speaker have to be endorsed by a majority of MPs in all parties separately. So a majority of Labour MPs, a majority of Conservative MPs, a majority of Lib Dem MPs etc, would have to ratify the appointment. Possibly that's a recipe for complete deadlock, but in any case a simple majority vote of MPs seems inadequate. It is very important that all parties are happy with the choice of Speaker - otherwise how can they have confidence in the parliamentary process?

Until politicians start thinking in more radical terms about reforming our outdated parliamentary institutions, doubts about the suitability of Parliament for the modern age will inevitably persist.

Some interesting additional info on the plot that failed

Because my recent blogging interests have been more politics than economics-related, I hadn't visited Paul Mason's blog for a while - which was a mistake as he posted a really good analysis of the failed plot against Gordon Brown last week.

His most important point, I think, is that the sequence of high-profile resignations by leading Blairites gave the impression that the ground was being laid for a Blairite coup which would see people like Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn - whom the left of the party can't stand - back in the cabinet. Whether those people really would have come back in is an open question. The problem was one of perception: to work, the challenge to Brown would have needed to be a pincer movement from right and left. The left decided not to play ball. I still think that's a big mistake but the most likely explanation is that they are waiting to take over the party after Brown leads it to catastrophic defeat. Amen to that, but I just hope there is something left to take over by then.

Paul Mason also offers a fascinating link to Labour blogger Hopi Sen - whom I remember meeting at university, many years ago, a few times in connection with the Labour Club for the brief time I was in it before I left when John Smith took over the leadership because it had become "too right wing". (There's prescience for ya - not even waiting until the New Labour era to bail out...) Hopi's post "how not to plot" offers essentially an expanded version of what Paul's post said. More interesting is the related post on Guardian journalist Allegra Stratton who was covering the Brown plot in detail but may have been systematically misinformed by her sources, leading her to vastly overstate the numbers of potential plotters. One's never sure who to believe with stories like this - it's all smoke and mirrors at the end of the day, Hopi Sen's sources may be just as crap as Allegra Stratton's, and the "number of plotters" wasn't some kind of fixed number 'out there' anyway - people react to events, and if the right combination of circumstances had occurred there probably would have been enough refuseniks to get rid of Brown.

But the problem with this kind of tittle-tattle is it's dangerously addictive. There was a guy I worked with once who spent six months reading political blogs when he was supposed to be doing the literature review for an important research project which then had to be salvaged by other members of his team while he went on to pastures anew. Incredible timewaster. So, if you're reading this, do switch it off.

Voting reform: Yes please, but no half-measures or B.S.

Team Brown has been making some noises about electoral reform over the last couple of days as part of a wider move to reform Westminster.

If we get proportional representation out of this, somehow, then great, but I'm sceptical it'll come to anything under Brown. For various reasons.

First, I don't think Brown really likes PR. His statements about electoral reform have made it clear that he wants to keep the constituency link between and MP and constituents.

If I had to submit an entry for 'most overrated idea in British politics', the constituency link would be it. The reason is obvious from personal experience. For about 75% of my life I have lived in Essex. During those years, only between 2001 and 2005 did I have a Labour MP (Alan Hurst). The rest of the time I have been represented by a selection of the most dreadful Tory idiots going. What's the point of having a link to an MP if you don't agree with them on any issue at all? How are they going to represent your interests?

(This is not a party political point by the way - a right-wing Conservative living in inner London could make exactly the same argument, swapping 'Tory' and 'Labour', in the paragraph above).

Any constituency will have a plurality of interests, and a plurality of interests demands a plurality of representation. Which is why bigger, multi-member constituencies are the way to go. The model used for the European parliament works reasonably well in my opinion. Certainly a lot better than first past the post.

With (say) 7 MPs per constituency, you've a reasonably good chance of finding at least one MP who can represent your interests, at least to a first approximation. The current system is a lottery of parliamentary boundaries.

And please don't try and palm us off with the Alternative Vote system. This isn't even proportional. Sometimes it can be less proportional than First Past the Post!

Brown was one of the people who helped kill the possibility of PR in the late 1990s when Tony Blair commissioned Roy Jenkins to look at it. In something of a first for this blog, I will say something positive about Tony Blair here: when the guy was starting out, he was interested in electoral reform. Conversations were had with Paddy Ashdown and it's quite possible that a new system could have emerged if certain "forces of conservatism" in the Labour party hadn't put spanners in the works.

The other main reason I don't think electoral reform will get on the statute book is that there seems to be two faulty assumptions doing the rounds which have become established wisdom: (a) we need a referendum to establish PR, and (b) there isn't time to change the system before next June.

We DON'T need a referendum. The Euro elections voting system was changed in the 1990s without a referendum: before that it was first past the post. Why should the Westminster voting system be any different? If we need a referendum on that then there are quite a few other important issues I'd like to see referenda on: ID cards, or EU membership, for instance...

And there's plenty of time to change the system. There is easily enough parliamentary time between the Queen's speech and the dissolution of parliament for the 2010 election to get this on the statute books.

Some people have suggested a referendum on voting reform on the same day as the next general election. What's the point of that? Once Cameron gets in he will just ignore it, even if the result is

It's quite simple, really: Brown doesn't really want voting reform and is making it look like he's laying the groundwork for these reforms whilst claiming that he's being hemmed in by factors outside his control which make it impossible for him to deliver. It's a masterpiece of political manipulation and we'd be fools to fall for it.

spineless, gutless, witless

I can't believe it - Brown survived the PLP meeting pretty much unscathed.

What the hell? Where were the rebels? Where was the email round robin?

Apparently about 8 MPs spoke out against Brown (out of about 300), about 25 spoke in favour. Brown was surrounded by the cabinet and senior party figures (Neil Kinnock, etc.) and on Channel 4 I just watched a leading rebel, Barry Sheerman, come out and say that Brown was leading the party forward and there wasn't even going to be a ballot of MPs to determine whether he should resign or not.

Jesus... this is the biggest case of mass delusion since they got busy with the Kool-Aid in Jonestown in 1978.

So Brown promised to listen more to the PLP? That's exactly what he said when he became Prime Minister. He didn't do it then, so why the hell is he going to do it now? Why is anybody in the PLP believing this rubbish?

When Gordon Brown leads the Labour party to electoral annihilation next year, it will be largely his fault (and of course Tony Blair's, although Brown has had plenty of time to purge the worst excesses of Blairism - if he had wanted to do so, but he didn't) but the rebels who couldn't get their act together will also have to shoulder some of the blame. As will the Cabinet heavyweights who could have done a Geoffrey Howe and taken him out - principally Alan Johnson and David Miliband. Full marks to James Purnell for at least having the guts to speak out.

The irony is that the Blairites, who have been so wrong on policy, are 100% right on strategy. Apparently Stephen Byers addressed a Progress rally today and said that Labour was headed for a repeat of 1983. At that point, everyone knew that Michael Foot, great guy that he was (and is), was leading the party to electoral oblivion - but no-one actually twisted the knife and deposed him. The result was a Conservative majority of about 150.

2010 will be a repeat of 1983 for Labour, except much worse. Labour achieved 28% of the vote in 1983; in 2010 it will be lucky to get 20%. With the Tories likely to get about 40%, a Conservative majority of 200 or more is not impossible. Labour might be pegged back to about 100 MPs; which means that anyone thinking about challenging for the leadership after the election who is not in an absolute rock-solid safe seat can forget about it.

The whole thing is a complete disaster, and I've had enough. At this point, I'm washing my hands of any further commentary on internal Labour Party politics for the foreseeable future. These Labour MPs have made their bed and now they have to lie in it. If there's anything left after the election then I'll help pick up the pieces, but there's nothing really left to talk about before then; a party committing suicide isn't particularly interesting or inspiring if you (at least nominally) support that party. So well done all you spineless, gutless, witless fools in the Parlimentary Labour Party; you're getting what you deserve, and I hope you feel good about yourselves.

strange bedfellows

I'm in the rather strange position of agreeing 100% with Frank Field. This from Frank's latest blog post on the Brown crisis:

Labour cannot win with the present Prime Minister. I was one of the seven who would not support his coronation after Tony Blair was shoehorned out of Number 10. But even I didn't think a Brown administration would be as inept as this one.

The Brownites are attempting to terrorise Labour MPs into inaction. If they succeed then we deserve our fate.

It is simply absurd to argue, as does No. 10, that the next leader must call an immediate general election. A new leader, when being invited by the Queen to form a government, should inform the Monarch that he or she intends to return in April of next year to call for a General Election on May 6.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Meanwhile, on closer analysis, what Jon Cruddas said about Brown was very sensible. He did NOT, as reported, say it would be madness to get rid of Brown. What he actually said - in the Sunday Mirror - was "to suggest we'll tackle [our] problems simply by chucking Gordon Brown overboard is madness". Which is absolutely true, of course. It would be possible - in theory - to make the necessary reforms to the voting system and to MPs' expenses with Brown still in charge; equally, it would be possible to change leader and have someone just as inept - or maybe even worse. But the most likely scenario for a Labour recovery still involves getting rid of Gordon and replacing him with someone who can do the job properly. And I think Jon Cruddas knows that; he just didn't want to stick the knife in before a clear alternative arrives on the horizon. Fair enough.

Myth-busting

One of the more ludicrous pieces of mythology doing the rounds at the moment - put about by a combination of Peter Mandelson and Nick Brown, no doubt - is that if the Labour party does get rid of Gordon Brown and replace him with a new leader, there will have to be an immediate general election.

WHY?

There wasn't an immediate general election when Brown replaced Blair. And a leader who has undergone a leadership election (as there would presumably be, if Brown refused to go quietly) would actually have more legitimacy, not less.

For sure, there'll be pressure from the Tories for a general election: but there has been for the last eighteen months, at least. The new leader can ride it out. It's only twelve months until an election has to be called, after all. The new leader can, in that time, get on with the fundamental reforms that are necessary to save UK democracy. Proportional representation. Abolition of the House of Lords. Reform of MPs' expenses. All of these could be pushed through in a few months.

The Mandelson mantra that a change of leader would mean an immediate general election is pure bullshit. And I don't believe for one second that Brown would unilaterally dissolve Parliament and ask the Queen for an election, either. He's stubborn and deluded, but he's not malicious. That's just more scaremongering.

So come on you rebels, Do The Right Thing and don't fall for this baloney that the Dark Lord Peter is trying to foist on ya. If Labour MPs fail to oust Brown because of this kind of crapola, they will be stupid as well as spineless.

Euro results - do I not like these.

The results from Scotland haven't come in yet but I've got enough to be going on with anyway. I would have done a live blog on the Euro elections (like I did for the US elections last year, and I'll certainly do for the general election when it comes) but it's just hard to generate the same levels of excitement.

The results were certainly worth analysing, however. Labour is projected to get only just over 15% of the national vote. Given that various pundits were racing round before the weekend saying that if Labour got less than 20% it would trigger a move against Brown, this should mean Brown is in very serious trouble indeed. We will probably find out later today whether the rebel MPs have secured enough signatures to move against Brown, as he is due to address a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party this evening. Some of the top political journalists - including the BBC's Nick Robinson and the Guardian's Michael White - have been suggesting in recent posts that Brown is probably safe. I'm sceptical of that and it seems that if anyone is going to mount a challenge, today (or at the latest Tuesday) would be the best possible time to do it. We'll see. If no-one makes a move I'll be pretty scathing about it... but let's give them a chance first.

The Tories did well but not spectacularly, getting 29% of the vote. UKIP, like in 2004, was on about 17%. The BNP managed a marginal increase in their share of the vote to 6.5% but secured 2 MEPs because the Labour vote collapsed in the North West and Yorkshire. Hopefully once people have seen what Nick Griffin and his colleague are like in office, they will be a strictly one-term phenomenon.

The Greens increased their share of the vote more than any other party - now up to about 9% - and had it not been for the contraction in the number of MEPs allocated to the UK (due to EU expansion) they would have secured a couple of extra seats. In the East of England they were within 2 percentage points of knocking out Labour - a very strong result. The Lib Dems did adequately, on 14%, but no more than that, and must still be very worried about what the continuing lacklustre performance of Nick Clegg is going to do to their chances at the next Westminster election.

Across the EU as a whole some commentators were surprised that the centre-left PES parties did so badly, running way behind the centre-right EPP parties in most countries. Both groups ceded ground to the far right (in its various guises including fascist and 'libertarian'), the Greens and the far left. I wasn't that surprised by the centre-left's weak performance. The European economy has collapsed and they have offered pretty much nothing by way of remedy. It's the Tony Blair prospectus writ large. If you don't provide credible policies why should anyone vote for you? The centre-right parties are similarly clueless, but can cover it up a lot better with nationalist bluster and garbage about being a 'safe pair of hands' which European voters simply seem to have disbelieved less than the crap being talked by the centre-left, who have been exposed as clueless converts to neo-liberalism at precisely the wrong time. It was a choice between honest morons and deluded morons.

If the PES had taken the far left and Green agendas on board a lot more, rather than being stuck in Tony Blair appreciation society mode, they'd have certainly done a lot better. In France for example the Greens actually moved into second place. There's a lesson there somewhere for the Labour party - but only Jon Cruddas (who inexplicably endorsed Gordon Brown on Sunday) is listening.

In Italy, the result defies analysis. Berlusconi, a cross between Rupert Murdoch and Benito Mussolini, actually increased his share of the vote. It's as if Dick Cheney had run for President in America in 2008 and received a landslide. Ludicrous.

Meanwhile, in Poland, a comforting setback for Dave Cameron's homophobic friends in the League of Polish Families - I'm happy with an advance for the centre-right any day of the week if it means a kick in the teeth for these imbeciles. But, to repeat the message from an earlier post, what does it say about Cameron's progressive credentials if he's prepared to jump into bed with reactionaries like this in Europe?

Is this the end of the line for Mo Dutta?

A funny thing happened this morning... woke up too early on Saturday (as I often do), switched on the radio hoping to catch Mo Dutta's early morning Radio 2 show, and he wasn't there any more! Looks like he's been kicked off the schedule and replaced by Zoe Ball.

Now I've nothing against Zoe, but she lacks the sheer comedy factor of Mo Dutta... I posted about Mo a couple of years back, when I was altogether too negative in describing him as "the real Alan Partridge". Yep, some of Mo's links were just bizarre - as if he'd had a couple of plastic containers of farm cider before starting up at 4am - and he used to ramble on a bit - well quite a lot really, but it was strangely amusing, and, like David Bowie's initially laughable 1987 "Never Let Me Down" album, I found that the more you kept listening, the better it got. It was like the art of local radio presenting taken to a Pythonesque logical extreme - brilliant in its own twisted way.

Also, the show provided a useful half-hour of employment for the Independent's travel correspondent Simon Calder - Mo always used to talk to him at ridiculous length about whereever he'd been the previous week, which was usually somewhere completely mental.

I hope they won't be able to keep Mo down for long and he will resurface somewhere. Can't see him on the Radio 2 schedule but maybe he'll turn up on Asian Network or local radio. If anyone does spot a new show by him, do let me know in a comment to this post. In the meantime I shall keep up my one-man campaign of emails to the BBC to request that Mo be given the slot for either Terry Wogan or Sarah Kennedy when one (or both) of the old warhorses is pensioned off or shoots the tea-boy by mistake - which surely can't be very long now.

And Mo, if you're reading this: we miss you.

Anyone for Guts?

There's a great John Cale song called "Guts" which starts with the very memorable opening couplet:

The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife

Did it quick, then split...

If we view the Labour party as the 'wife' and either Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as the 'bugger in the short sleeve' this provides a very interesting analogy, apart from the fact that they did it over fifteen years, an eternity if as Harold Wilson thought, "a week is a long time in politics."

I've been thinking a lot about guts in the last 24 hours, the lull between the annihilation of the local election results and the humiliation of the Euro election results. The Euros are announced a few days later because some EU countries like to vote over the weekend, and, unlike the USA, we Europeans seem to be sane enough not to announce results from one part of the continent while another part of the continent is still voting.

This gap has created a weird 48-hour political stasis. Everybody knows those Euro results are going to be bloody awful... in some regions Labour might come in fifth, behind the Tories, UKIP, Lib Dems and the Greens. Labour's share of the vote is likely to be less than 20 percent.

There have been several open announcements by MPs, both known mavericks and former loyalists, that the game is up and Brown should step down. There are now two questions. One is whether the email 'round robin' campaign that has been circulating around the Labour ranks will be able to pick up the 80 to 100 signatures necessary to convince a leadership challenger that he/she can get the necessary support - 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party to stand. I would say this is pretty much a certainty. Despite the fact that so far only a few dozen MPs have openly declared themselves as wanting Brown to go, dozens more - perhaps well over a hundred - will be ready to say the same thing via email. Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona makes the point well.

The other (I believe harder) question is whether a big contender can be persuaded to throw his or her hat into the ring, once that email is released into the open showing the number of signatories backing it. The most obvious contender is Alan Johnson, who has backed the PM - to an extent - so far. It's important to be clear: if Johnno wants to be PM, Monday - or Tuesday at the latest - is the time to declare. He won't get a better chance - indeed he probably won't get another chance at all. If he baulks now, and waits until after the general election to throw his hat into the ring, there will be all sorts of other contenders - Jimmy Purnell, one or two Milibands, Harriet Harman, Jonny Cruddas, and heck knows who else (assuming any of these is left with a seat in Parliament by then). And I would imagine in those circumstances Labour would go with a younger leader, less tainted by the failures of the past few years.

In any case, Labour is likely to be a rather tatty and dehydrated piece of rump steak in electoral terms after the next election if Brown stays on until then. As I've indicated in previous posts, there is some attraction to the political enema that a truly heinous defeat would impose on the party: with both the Blairite and Brownite factions shot to hell, a new, radical vision could emerge. New, red/green shoots. Unfortunately the Tories have made no secret of the fact that the electoral reforms they will undertake will be designed to shore up the lunacy that is First Past The Post while rejigging it to cancel out Labour's advantage (smaller constituencies in Scotland, Wales and urban areas, where Labour is relatively strong) - totally understandable given the current biases, but also totally reactionary.

What the country needs is radical electoral reform now. Alan Johnson as PM could deliver this in a few months with the help of the Liberal Democrats, then stage an election under the new rules this autumn, or at the latest, next spring. The need to deliver immediate and radical reform to the UK constitution - tackling MPs' expenses as well as the rottenness of the Westminster electoral system - is the ideal riposte to the many critics who would call for an immediate general election if the leader is changed. This may be the only opportunity we ever have to deliver fundamental political reform in the UK and it would be a shame to balls it up (no pun intended, Ed) now. So Alan: it's over to you. You can do it. All you need is Guts.

A Mickey Mouse cabinet

Oh dear. Geoff Hoon has left the cabinet. Once again, in normal circumstances this would be a cause for celebration: he's one of the duffest ministers Nu Labor has ever had. As defence secretary he spent most of his time attacking anti-war protesters and as transport secretary he has said yes to every scheme that the privatised railways have come up with to swindle commuters out of more of their hard-earned cash. (There is a whole blog that could be written about that, and maybe someone out there is doing that already, unfortunately I don't have the time.) No-one will miss him. 

The problem is that his replacement as transport secretary is Andrew Adonis, probably the most right-wing person in the Labour party. 

Others have resigned: Margarett Beckett and Caroline Flint, leaving Brown with almost no women at cabinet or senior minister level. 

This cabinet really does look a bit Mickey Mouse: good news, then, that it probably won't be around for very long. I would predict more resignations and the decisive move against Brown when the Euro election results come out on Monday. 

Hutt off

The weird thing is, in happier times I would have been of the opinion that John Hutton resigning was a Very Good Thing for Gordon Brown and Labour. But now it just looks like another nail in the coffin. This is the Dawn of the Dead... Brown is a zombie parading around the shopping mall that is Whitehall. 

How many people are going to be left in this Cabinet by Monday? Even the attempt to sabotage Alan Johnson by putting him in the Home Office ain't gonna wash... that's going to be the shortest appointment of all time. 

Kill The King

Rainbow, IMHO, was one of the weaker heavy metal outfits of the late seventies. Vocalist Ronnie James Dio is (with the possible exception of Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" LP) crap, and the whole sub-Dungeons and Dragons feel to the lyrics has never struck me as particularly interesting. They got better once Richie Blackmore replaced Dio with other vocalists (first Graham Bonnet and then Joe Lynn Turner) and switched over to love songs, producing two classics in "Since You've Been Gone" and "I Surrender", but even so, that's just about all anyone remembers from them nowadays. For straight-down-the-line rock'n'roll give me "Golden Earring's Greatest Hits Vol 3" anyday. 

But Rainbow did manage some good song titles, and one of them, "Kill The King", is the title for this post, and for a very good reason. 

Because, unusually, James Purnell is right. It's time to get rid of Gordon Brown. 

The guy has had two years to banish the disastrous aftertaste of the cod-Tory Blair era, and he's done almost nothing. Most of what he has done moves us in the wrong direction. We are stuck with stupid and disastrous policies - privatisation of the post office, ID cards, privatisation of welfare, a continuing commitment to a bloody stupid voting system, failure to reverse privatisation of the railways - I could go on and on. Meanwhile, the increase in public spending as a share of GDP to pay for improvements in services - one of the only remotely "progressive" things about new Labour - has been jettisoned because of the economic collapse, and we face a decade of retrenchment and spending cuts which will damage the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. 

Yes, Brown has averted disaster - at least for now - on the economy, and there have been a few good policy moves, like the 50p income tax rate. But it's nowhere near enough. This guy is the biggest disappointment as PM since - well, EVER. Sadly, those awful Blairites like John Hutton who said he would be an awful prime minister were right. 

There is an escape route - a way to prevent a Tory landslide at the next election. Alan Johnson can be installed as leader, do a deal with the Liberal Democrats to change the voting system to proportional representation, then dissolve parliament in the autumn and call an election under the new rules. I don't think the Tories can get anywhere near 50%. Even if the Tories went into coalition with the Lib Dems after an election, it'd still be better than sticking with what we've got. 

Both the left and the right of the Labour party realise this - Purnell included. Brown is left clinging to a shrinking island of support which will eventually just comprise himself, Nick Brown, and Ed Balls. He can make it easier for himself by resigning on Monday, after the Euro election results (which will be disastrous) come out. Otherwise it's gonna get very ugly indeed - we're likely to see mass resignations from the cabinet. Blears and Purnell were only the first wave. 

Of course there will be calls for an immediate general election if the leader is changed, but Johnson can play the plumber role; if he points out that he is conducting essential maintenance to the Westminster democractic system, which can't wait, he can turn the crisis of political legitimacy to his advantage. Then, we'll either have revolution (George Osborne as Che Guevara anybody?) or we'll have a new voting system. Either way, things must improve from where they are at now. 

I feel a bit like the guy with the cigar in the A Team: "I love it when a plan comes together". 

No Photoshop required this time

So Jimmy Purnell has stepped down from the Cabinet. And this time it's not some revisionist Photoshop job, but a genuine challenge to Gordon Brown.

Make no mistake, this is a much more bold challenge than Hazel Blears, who didn't mention Brown in her resignation statement. Purnell has said the following:

"I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely. That would be disastrous for our country.... I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning. As such I am resigning from government."

I don't see how Brown can survive much longer. We'll see the local election results tomorrow... but does anyone believe they won't be dire?

With friends like these...

The BBC website is leading at the moment on Peter Mandelson, who has urged Labour MPs (I was going to say 'fellow Labour MPs' but of course he's not an MP, he's another unelected idiot who's been parachuted in to wreck our lives) not to sign the letter that's going round urging Brown to resign.

Well done Peter. I can't think of anything more guaranteed to make MPs more likely to sign. Mandelson is hated across most of the Labour party, and particularly on the left. Following Hazel Blears's detonation yesterday, it looks increasingly likely that Brown is toast. If they can get around 80 to 100 MPs to sign that letter (which shouldn't be that difficult), the only question mark is, if Brown digs his heels in and refuses to resign, will a big hitter - the obvious candidate would be Johnson - force a leadership challenge. He can win, now: all he needs is guts. 

Never has a loss made me so happy

Ryanair lost money. Yay.

The whole thing is the cowboy outfit to end all cowboy outfits. Yeah, so the 'face value' ticket price is often cheap if you book far enough ahead. But they charge you for a ridiculous panoply of stuff (including checking in, which it's quite difficult to avoid actually, except if you don't turn up). And it's run by the cheapest punk going, the asshole Michael O'Leary, who runs second only to Rupert Murdoch in the "business wanker" stakes. 

I flew with them last year and it was f***ing horrible. Even though Jeremy Paxman was on the plane. Never again. 

That loss has really made my day. If News International announce a huge loss, I think I'll cry with joy. 

Some random musings on the new Star Trek movie

Saw the inventively named Star Trek yesterday afternoon and I enjoyed it. Not a complete classic by any means, but a good movie.

In lieu of giving away plot spoilers, some random thoughts about the film, in roughly chronological order: 

• the USS Kelvin didn't appear to have any warp engines - indeed it looks like the Enterprise without warp engines. I wonder how they got around. 
• Kirk's black cadet top looks way cooler than the traditional yellow 'tour leader' jersey that Shatner wore on TV. In fact, as they sussed out in the TNG movies, everybody should wear black. 
• Karl Urban as Bones - brilliant.
• Zachary Quinto as Spock - beyond brilliant. Uncanny. 
• Simon Pegg as Scotty - more Irvine Welsh than James Doohan, but good nonetheless. 
• Anton Yelchin as Chekov - come on guys, Walter Koenig's accent wasn't that ludicrous in the original. And where the hell was his Beatles/Monkees hairstyle? 
• the plot lacked originality to say the least - seemed to be assembled from a cut-up of The Wrath of Khan and Nemesis - but it was at least well executed and provides a convincing rationale for breaking series continuity (which was pretty strained to begin with after Star Trek: Enterprise)
• Thank God, no cameo for Scott Bakula (although 'Admiral Archer' is mentioned at one point.) 

And that's all I can think of at this precise moment in time. Star Trek looks set to be the box-office smash of the year, which means a sequel asap, I should imagine. People are lapping this stuff up. And good luck to them. I mean, to us.  

Johnson + PR + Lib Dems = salvation?

An interesting alliance of right wing and left wing columnists speculating today on the latest scheme to save New Labour's ass - e.g. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian and Peter Oborne in the Mail.

The plot, roughly speaking, goes like this:

1. Alan Johnson becomes Prime Minister.
2. He introduces proportional representation.
3. He calls a general election.
4. The Tories fail to secure 50% of the seats.
5. Labour go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

It's an interesting theory. Although I have previously suggested that Alan Johnson would be seen as not young or fresh enough if he attempted to run for the leadership after an election, before an election might be a different matter. There are several ways in which it could fall down, though. For instance:

• How, precisely, does Alan Johnson stage a coup to get rid of Brown? The most obvious scenario is if the whole cabinet - or almost the whole cabinet excepting Ed Balls - just tell Brown, perhaps following the Euro election results announcement on Monday 8th June, that his time is up, and he either resigns or they will back Johnson as a candidate in a leadership campaign. That will take a lot of coordination and balls - not Ed Balls but real balls - which have been in short supply recently (and indeed perhaps always).
• Could Johnson get PR through the house of Commons with the current composition of MPs? Presumably all the Tories would vote against, and all the Lib Dems would vote in favour. Could enough Labour MPs be pushed through the lobby to get it through? Maybe.
• When the election is held under the new system, can Labour and the Lib Dems poll enough between them to command a majority of MPs? With Labour on approximately 20% (on a good day) and the Lib Dems on 15% (on a good day), this looks unlikely. But then again, the Tories are polling at around 40% rather than above 50%. So, assuming that minor parties like UKIP and the Greens would improve their support under PR, we might be looking at some very weird coalitions emerging after the election. Which would certainly be interesting, but perhaps not what Labour had originally intended. A Tory-Lib Dem coalition might be the most stable outcome - and fear of that might stop Labour from introducing the reform in the first place.

There would inevitably be huge accusations of opportunism confronting Johnson, or anyone else who tried to implement this kind of scheme. Having said that, this could be the best possible time to do it. Johnson could say to his critics: (a) everybody accepts that fundamental reform is needed, and (b) we need a general election asap - and as soon as we've changed the voting system, you'll have it. My guess is that once we've moved away from the lunacy that is first past the post, we'll never go back to it.

The poll just published in the Telegraph reinforces the feeling that change could be near. With Labour down to 22% in general election voting intentions (below the Lib dems for the first time since 1987), and 19% in the Euro voting intentions, Johnson and co. may have a relatively easy time of persuading Team Brown that the game is up come June 8th. But I'm still rather sceptical that Gordon will Go Quietly.

Euro-elections: Be aware that if you vote for the Tories, you are voting to strengthen the hard right

The Guardian leads today on Dave Cameron's plans to withdraw from the European People's Party (the main centre right grouping in the European Parliament - Merkel, Sarkozy etc.) and form an alliance with anti-gay fascists hiding under the "league of families" banner in Poland, the Czech Republic and Latvia.

Apparently this is an outgrowth of a pledge Cameron made during the 2005 Tory leadership campaign (about the only pledge he's ever made on anything?) that he would withdraw the Conservatives from the EPP grouping - to try to increase his support from the right of the party after the ludicrous (but at least honest) Liam Fox, who'd been standing on a hard right nationalist ticket, dropped out. 

I guess you could give Dave some plaudits for consistency, but that's about it. How does allying the Tories in Europe with a bunch of politicians who would be operating under the BNP banner if based in the UK square with "progressive Conservativism"? I don't see any way that it can. The key question is: is Cameron just advocating this shift in Europe to honour his 2005 commitment, or is this a symptom of what his real agenda is. If the former, why on earth jeapordise his political credibility by jumping in bed with these nutters? If the latter, then we may find the allies of the BNP a lot closer to power than we'd like - partly as a result of Dave lending them credibility. Absolutely appalling. 

Why on earth would the Queen be embarrassed by the BNP? It's in the family

Interesting news that BNP leader Nick Griffin has decided to pull out of attending a Buckingham Palace garden party in July "for fear of embarrassing the Queen". 

Whilst my main advice to Mr Griffin on his future schedule is that he should flush himself down the nearest public convenience en route to where he belongs - in the sewer - I'm surprised that journalists and commentators should feel the Queen would be embarrassed by Mr Griffin. Fascism runs in the British royal family. The Queen's uncle, Edward VIII (latterly the Duke of Windsor) was a well known Nazi sympathiser, and the Queen Mother was apparently a staunch supporter of the 1980s Botha regime in South Africa. With people like these as ancestors, the Queen would have probably been able to have a perfectly reasonable conversation with Griffin. But instead she will have to make do with the BNP's Greater London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook instead. Oh well. If only the Queen Mother was still alive to say "I like that Richard Barnbrook, he's the kind of fellow this country needs..."

For a Church that supposedly lacks moral leadership, these guys are doing a damned good job

Absolutely excellent intervention by Church of England Archbishops Rowan Williams and John Sentamu on the BNP today. Basically saying "please do not vote for these people under any circumstances". 

The C of E is often accused of lacking "moral leadership" but on this issue the archbishops have grasped the nettle and rightly so. 

The BNP's Nick Griffin says it is time the church "grew up" and started talking to them about issues. 

Well, one issue is that a message of hate for anyone non-British (which is the BNP's basic stance - that's what the 'voluntary repatriation policy' boils down to) seems to my, admittedly not well-informed religious compass, fundamentally at odds with any reasonable interpretation of the Christian message. 

I went to a (C of E) Christening service for a family relative's baby in Halifax a few years back. The priest's sermon was in many ways woeful - he went on a diatribe against gay priests while saying that although he himself had split up with his wife, that was OK because "it's above board and everybody knows about it". It was like something out of a David Peace novel. So the guy was objectionable and woefully inconsistent, but even so, he still spent ten minutes explaining why it was important to mobilise against the BNP in Halifax and encouraging people to attend public marches and demonstrations. 

The Church of England has many faults (although not as many, I would argue, as the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches, both of which are far more reactionary in most ways)  but putting up with fascism isn't one of them. And Amen to that.

Also big props to Polly Toynbee of the British Humanist Association, who issued a statement supporting the archbishops. If we can get (sane) non-religious people and (sane) religious people pulling in the same direction on these issues, that's got to be the way forward. 

Expensesgate: the political fallout

• More than 2 weeks into the Telegraph's expenses scandal, and I'm still riveted by it. I can understand that many people will be bored stiff by the whole thing, but it may still be that some of the best is yet to come.

For example, Tory MP Anthony Steen spectacularly misjudged the public mood by saying that the only reason people were angry was because they were jealous of his big house, and that Freedom of Information legislation had been a Very Bad Thing because it had fed public envy. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten that these bastard taxpayers were paying for his goddamn trees to be maintained. Pay the piper, call the tune.

Sir Peter Viggers (why are they giving honours to wankers like this)'s floating duck island was also a rare moment of high comedy. Well done mate.

But it's not clear yet to what extent Expensesgate will manifest itself in changes to voting intentions. The latest ICM survey in the Guardian compares European election voting intentions with the results in 2004. Some noteworthy findings are:

• Labour on 24%, 1% above its 2004 polling.
• Greens at 9%, up from 6% in 2004.
• UKIP on 10%, down from 16% in 2004. If these figures are right, reports of a big swing to UKIP are simply wrong.
  
• BNP on 1%, down from 4% in 2004.

I'm not sure I believe that BNP result - it's highly likely that they are up at about 10% (say) and people are too embarrassed to admit to pollsters that they're voting for them. So as well as being fascist tossers, BNP voters are cowards as well. Quelle surprise.

These poll results don't indicate a seismic shift in voting intentions though, especially bearing in mind that the Euro elections are much more likely to attract a protest vote than a Westminster election. If the Tories and Labour were both down below 20% then we would begin to see some interesting gains for minor parties, even under first-past-the-post. But, unless there is a wave of independent Martin Bell-type challengers (certainly possible), the expenses scandal is not on course to upset the Westminster applecart - yet. For that to happen, public outrage has to translate to much bigger shifts in voting intentions.

Enough to give anyone a severe distrust of the Catholic Church

Absolutely frightening revelations from Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse.

As the Guardian reports, "thousands of boys and girls were raped, abused and exploited by the religious brothers and nuns who were supposed to look after them."

I knew a bit about this anyway as my grandmother used to tell stories about being regularly beaten by nuns in school in Ireland (she was an orphan).

All this will horrify rank-and-file Catholics as much as the rest of us. I just hope that reforms have been put in place to stop this kind of thing ever happening again. But given the reactionary nature of the present Pope it is hard to hold out hope of fundamental reforms. The problem with the Catholic Church is exactly the same as the problem with Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union - when you have an authoritarian unelected apparatus with no accountability, it will inevitably attract people who feel that their vocation is to bully, exploit and torture people. In the end, democratic accountability is the only way forward for religious institutions, just like political institutions.

It is very unlikely that I would ever join up to the Christian religion - although not impossible. But if I did, it would have to be one of the denominations which gives power to the rank and file - for example the Methodists or the Quakers.

Not sure really why I'm blogging in any detail about this, given that I'm no Christian and certainly no Catholic. I guess it just struck a family chord.

Who's gonna get it (in the neck?)

The last instalment in a three-post series analysing what the most likely - and (probably not the same) the most desirable - scenarios are for the next Labour leader.

As each day passes I'm driven towards the conclusion, which many of you will have reached already, that Labour is headed for an absolute landslide defeat. Probably down to less than 200 seats in the next parliament.

Polly Toynbee has recently been converted to the view that Brown should go before the next election - in fact, that he should step down now. She is now backing Alan Johnson as an alternative leader. This is a turnaround from the last few months, when she was saying Brown was the only hope - and then before that, in mid-2008, when she was saying Brown must go - and then before that, in 2007, when she was saying Brown was the best thing since sliced bread. I think Polly is very good on most things, but on this particular subject, she's lost it.

I don't think Johnno would do much good at this stage anyway. There's not enough time to put together a coherent political strategy between now and next June. The main battleground (apart from MPs' expenses) is the economy, where Alan has not really had much experience (not that Cameron or Osborne have either, but there you go). In 2006/07, even in 2008, I was saying yes to a Johnno bid for the leadership, but I think it's too late now.

I think Polly Toynbee is wrong anyway: best to let Gordon Brown take the hit and preside over an annihilation of the New Labour project. Then we can start over. It sure as hell ain't gonna be easy. But it doesn't have to be such a complete cock-up as the William Hague/Iain Duncan Smith era was for the Tory party.

Why? Because the Tories made the mistake of retreating into a more extreme version of the Thatcherite policies which the voters had soundly rejected in 1997. Hague and Duncan Smith were hard-line Thatcherites.

The analogue would be if a rump Labour party just retreated into a hardcore Blairite or neo-Blairite agenda - Alan Milburn/John Hutton/Steve Byers territory - after the next election. But I don't see any reason why they'd do this. The main leadership contenders - the Milibands and Cruddas - don't have a huge ideological attachment to Blairism. (OK, I'm not totally sure about David Miliband, but we'll come back to that). The party base and the unions sure as hell don't want it. Whether the parliamentary Labour Party wants it depends on its composition after the next election, which would take me too long to analyse at this point, but I would imagine that most MPs will be flexible enough to try a move away from the Blair/Brown agenda, rather than more of the same thing that has just destroyed the party electorally.

So, with Blairism (and Brownism, which is much closer to Blairism than most people think) discredited, there will be a space for genuine radical thinking in the Labour party - in the same way that Dave Cameron moved in with genuine (for the Tories) radical thinking after 2 election defeats for the post-Thatcherite agenda in opposition. The main thing, though, is that whoever the leader is, they need their shit together from day one (or at least Year One). Labour cannot afford to f*** about in opposition in a Tory 1997-2005 style, let alone a Labour 1979-83 style. (In fact Labour can't afford much of anything as the party owes millions - they will probably have to go bankrupt and start again - but due to the wonders of modern bankruptcy law designed to encourage 'entrepreneurial behaviour', that's no great problem, so we won't worry about it.)

Who should the next Labour party leader be? I would be happy to see either Jon Cruddas or Ed Miliband do it. Cruddas has the advantage that his powder is very dry, politically speaking - he's not been a government minister at any time - and he has a reputation for plain speaking coupled with an intelligent and logical analysis of political issues, which is an unusual combination. (Many current political heavyweights don't have even one of those attributes, let alone both). Ed Miliband has managed to be about as radical as one can be in the present New Labour cabinet without actually getting kicked out, and has been reasonably effective as Climate Change Secretary - overturning at least some of the shitty decisions that Gordon Brown has made on the environment. He's also a very good speaker, albeit with less of the common touch than Jon Cruddas. On the flipside, he's younger than Cruddas (but I don't know if youth is really that important. Ming Campbell was supposedly deposed from the Lib Dem leadership for being too old, but Vince Cable is one of the most popular politicians in Parliament, and he's almost as old as Campbell. Go figure.)

David Miliband, some journalists' favourite choice, would be less my inclination, partly because I felt the guy sucked up to Tony Blair far too much (indeed my nickname for him was "microBlair" at the time), and partly because I'm not really sure he has the same kind of progressive ideological backbone that Ed has. That's no barrier to a successful top-flight ministerial career - indeed he has already achieved that, as Foreign Secretary - but a decent Labour Party leader needs to have strong ideological convictions. The fatal flaw of Tony Blair was that he didn't in general - and on the occasion he did, they were brainstormingly right-wing. Gordon Brown claimed to have strong ideological convictions, but we've seen precious little of them from him as PM. In fact we've seen precious little of anything from Gordon - the word 'failure' doesn't even begin to cover it.

Other options for leader look dreadful or unrealistic. I've already covered Alan Johnson; I think he'll be seen as too old and he won't really want it anyway, except as a caretaker - but why go for a caretaker when you can have the real thing? The arguments against Jack Straw are pretty much the same as Johnson. Harriet Harman is popular with certain activists but would go down like a lead balloon with the public, and is not as radical as she claims to be, by any stretch. The old guard of Blairites - Milburn, Clarke, Byers, etc. - are delusional if they think they can run successfully for the leadership. How, exactly?

James Purnell is an interesting one. My instincts on Purnell are that he's pretty duff but an acquaintance of mine who works for him suggests otherwise, and as this acquaintance is not in the habit of talking bollocks, I have to at least weigh that in my deliberations. According to Guardian journalist Allegra Stratton, there is some kind of backroom plot among Blairites to pair up Purnell and Jon Cruddas in some kind of 'dream ticket' (a phrase last used about the Neil Kinnock- Roy Hattersley combination, which admittedly was somewhat underwhelming). I'm inclined to think this is just yer standard "journo attends think-tank party and is desperate to write something" bollocks - but it is nonetheless marginally intriguing.

You can assume that any Labour MP not mentioned here in connection with the leadership is either too boring, too extreme (which doesn't mean they wouldn't be good - John McDonnell, for example, would be a class act as leader, but he just ain't got the power base to run for it) or too damn heinous to spend any time on. But we can always come back to this as I don't think that election will be any time soon, no matter what expenses claims excitement emerges from the woodwork.

Best football article EVER in a national newspaper

Steven Wells (who I remember from my NME-reading days: his Fish interview in 1989 was a classic) on why the Premiership should be nationalised.

I can't disagree with a word of this. Classic stuff.

The Boys are Back in the Bubble... Worrying signs on QE?

An interesting piece from Edmund Conway of the Telegraph on quantitative easing here. Conway's political stance sucks (the Institute of Economic Affairs has never published "an excellent pamphlet", and given that for the last 60 years they have been advising governments to reduce regulation of all markets as much as possible, their claim that the credit crunch was caused by lack of financial oversight, while true, identifies them as culpable, along with the rest of the Right wing) but his basic argument looks sensible, and is pretty terrifying.

Conway's basic allegation is that investment banks and hedge funds are making money by buying government debt at cheap prices, and then selling it back to the government (via the quantitative easing operations) at higher prices. I don't have the price data to hand to check this one way or the other, but if it's true, basically the government is handing out taxpayers' money to investment banks and hedge funds. Yes, it's boosting nominal economic activity, but at vast taxpayer expense, and for how long?

Buying private sector debt, not government debt, would be a far better policy, and I don't know why the Bank of England isn't doing that. Hell, printing extra banknotes and dropping them in the street would be a better policy.

It looks like all we're doing is inflating a new bubble to take the place of the old one. That would explain the brief stock market rally of the past few weeks. Forget "green shoots": stage 2 of the economic implosion could be even worse than what we've had so far. Stock up on canned food, kids.

Gorbals to Martin

Good to see that a no-confidence motion in House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin is being tabled for next week. The motion is tabled by Tory MP Douglas Carswell but has support from a selection of MPs in all parties. 

Martin is the absolute definition of a real turkey. When the allegations regarding MPs' abuse of the expenses system surfaced, he took a "my MPs, right or wrong" attitude and decided to ask police to investigate the source of the leak to the Telegraph.

When criticised for this by Labour's Kate Hoey and the Lib Dems' Norman Baker, he then lashed out at both MPs. To Hoey, he said "I listen to you often, when I turn on my television at midnight, and I hear your public utterances and your pearls of wisdom on Sky News. It's easy to talk then." To Baker: "another member who is keen to say to the press what the press wants to hear."

The implication being: what, exactly? That MPs who talk to the media are not doing their job properly? 

The man is a cretin and should be removed from his position. There are 650 MPs and almost all of them could do a better job as Speaker, I don't doubt.  The Speaker is, by convention, unopposed by the other parties when standing at elections, but given how duff this guy is, if he stays in the post there's a good chance an independent challenger could beat him. Which would be a cause for celebration. 

Who wants it? Continued

As promised last week, more thoughts on who might become Labour leader after the next election will emerge from this blog shortly. Today, I want to give you my overall take on what the most desirable post-election scenario is, in terms of how badly Labour is defeated. 

Although the present MPs' expenses scandal is now turning to backbench Tory MPs claiming for swimming pools and the upkeep of their country mansions, which may rub off rather badly on the Conservatives, on balance I think it's a safe bet to assume that the Government will come off worst from this because they are the people who should have been doing something about it. 

Combined with McBridegate and all the other crap that has happened over the past 2 years, it seems to me almost inconceivable that Labour could now emerge from the next election with an overall majority. I think a general election campaign would narrow the poll gap between the two parties, mainly because the economy would be a key focus, and although Labour's promises of an end to boom and bust have been revealed as total eyewash, the Tories - and in particular George Osborne - still look completely unconvincing in terms of economic policy. Does anybody know what they would do differently to Labour if in power? OK so they might be deliberately vague in the style of pre-1997 Tony Blair, but Labour at least had a few soundbites to rely on - "more teachers", "tough on crime" etc. The Tories haven't even got that. 

Having said that, Cameron is popular (largely because the British people seem to have this obsession with political leaders being carbon copies of Tony Blair, for reasons I will probably never understand. We have two of them now - Cameron and Clegg...)  and so I think the Tories will at least be the largest party. Because of the bias in the electoral system, they probably need to be around 6 points in front to secure an overall majority - which again, is likely.

From my POV the relationship between number of Labour seats and my confidence in the prospects for Labour going forward (in terms of becoming a real force for positive political change in this country) is U-shaped. The scenario of a hung parliament, and the scenario of a complete wipeout - Labour reduced below 200 seats or so - are both more appealing than a clear but not landslide defeat - say a Tory majority of around 50. 

Why? Because a hung parliament or a wipeout offer more opportunity for change and less opportunity for more of the crap we've had to endure over the last 11 years. 

In a hung parliament the Conservatives would probably go into coalition with the Lib Dems. If Clegg has any political ability whatsoever (still largely unproven either way), some form of proportional representation would have to be introduced. Which could lead to a huge political realignment, with at least 4 main parties: 

• hard right (low tax Eurosceptic. David Davis, Michael Gove, maybe George Osborne. ).
• centre-right/post-Blairite (authoritarian, stealth privatisation of public services. Dave Cameron, Steve Byers, Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke, Ken Clarke)
• rump Lib Dems (civil liberties, localism, pro-EU. The Nick Clegg personality cult essentially. If it goes more libertarian, we could see David Davis in this camp as well). 
• left (tax and spend, social democrat. Jon Cruddas, Ed Miliband, maybe Vince Cable. Would be most effective if combined with the Greens for a red/green agenda)

This would be a much more honest cut of the British political cake than the current two-and-a-half party mish-mash. 

Of course, without PR (and it's possible Clegg wouldn't have the political acumen to make that bargain) a Tory-Lib Dem coalition could be disastrous; a moderate cover for savage right wing tax cut and spending cut policies. But there is at least a possibility that this scenario could produce a good outcome. 

In the wipeout scenario, by contrast, Labour goes below 200 seats. This would be very tough in the short run, with a lot of bloodletting and recriminations. The silver lining to the cloud is that the Blairites - and the duff elements of the Brownites - would most probably lose control of the party to a reconstituted left wing. The blinding reality of the total failure of Blair/Brown as an economic strategy would probably see to that. Dave Cameron would be left to carry on the legacy of Tony Blair, which will largely manifest itself in huge rises in economic inequality, the decimation of public services as a prelude to privatisation, and other right-wing nastiness. Given that there is a real likelihood that the Tories will make a complete hash of things (in the Ted Heath style), this outcome really isn't as bad as it looks. Labour could sweep back in after just one term out of office as long as they get their shit together. I will come back to likely leadership candidates in the final post (for now) on this topic, later this week.  

The most dangerous scenario is the moderate defeat - because it won't be enough of an electoral beating to dislodge the cretins who are running the party at the moment. Of course Brown will go, but there's a much greater chance that a Brownite (or Blairite) candidate would prevail in the leadership contest to follow. This is also a risk in the hung parliament scenario, but due to the possibility of electoral reform and the fluidity and instability of the situation, that looks preferable to me. 

For this reason I am actually rather encouraged by the latest batch of polls showing Labour at 23%. If they can get below 20, I am fairly confident of the wipeout to end all wipeouts. Then we can Take Out The Trash and start again. It will not be easy, but then neither is the prospect of another generation of Blairite/Brownite zombies running things. 

I will come back to the leadership contenders later this week. 

National Mild Day

As organised by the Campaign for Real Ale. 

"What's mild?" I hear you ask. It's probably the UK's greatest style of beer. Sweeter than bitter, less heavy than stout or porter. 

If you can find a pub that does it (in the south and east of England, free houses are your best bet; in the midlands or north west you'll have more luck with regional brewers as it's more popular there)... ENJOY. 

I've been an obsessive for mild ever since 1993, when I was having a pint with my dad in Oxford and a punter came into the bar and asked for mild and the barman said "I'm sorry, we don't serve it". Dad muttered "what sort of pub doesn't serve mild? This isn't a pub, it's a shithouse".

Nice one, dad. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the Telegraph has done the public a great service

I'm finding the reports from the Telegraph on MP's expenses very interesting. They got hold of the details of all recent expenses claims via a leak. This page gives details of the . Some of the claims do look pretty extraordinary. £22,500 to treat dry rot at a seaside second home? A £320,000 profit in 27 months on a house bought with taxpayers' money?

I must single out for a special mention Labour MP Barry Gardiner, because (based on the testimony of people I know who have worked with him) he is such a complete dork. Gardener made a profit of £200,000 on a Westminster flat renovated using payments which he then claimed as expenses - despite the fact his main home is only 8 miles from parliament. 

It seems to me that we are in for a wave of anti-sleaze sentiment which will make the previous high-point of anti-sleaze, at the 1997 election, look positively tame. That election delivered Martin Bell to Westminster on an anti-corruption ticket. It is possible that next year's election could see dozens of anti-sleaze MPs elected. Next year could be the year when millions of citizens rise up and say they've had enough of MPs on the take.

For the most part, the MPs' attempts to defend themselves miss the point completely. "It was all within the rules", they say. Undoubtedly. But who made those rules? Parliament. The point is that the rules are so lax as to allow ludicrous expense claims that no-one in a job elsewhere (outside senior executives in the banking sector, perhaps) would be entitled to.  Gordon Brown says that the system requires reform - which it does - but why hasn't anything been done in the last 11 years then? Aren't he and previous Prime Ministers guilty of negligence for allowing these crazy expense rules to exist for so long? 

Certainly, MPs living too far away for a reasonable commute need accommodation in London. But why should they be able to make hundreds of thousands of pounds on accommodation which the taxpayer is paying for? If the taxpayer pays, the taxpayer should get the returns. Better still, MPs' offices could include proper overnight accommodation facilities - bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens etc. The Houses of Parliament should really be like a big hotel. 

I think the Telegraph has done us a great service by publishing all this stuff. I hope they make the complete list of expenses claims available for download and perusal at some point in the near future as it would be good to have a database where everyone could see exactly what their MP has been claiming. Let's have all this out in the open. 

Chelsea deserve dodgy refereeing

I was LMFAO when I read about the Chelsea-Barcelona result. 

All these lame fools who are trying to kill or maim the 'dodgy referee' should remember that Chelsea is only where it is because of the financial input of Roman Abramovich - one of the dodgiest businessmen in the world. An oligarch who made his money via the World-Bank sanctioned robbing of the Russian people after the fall of the Soviet Union, as the sell-off of state-owned industries concentrated huge amounts of wealth and power in the hands of the few. 

Given the immense bias of UK Premiership and European football towards clubs with the financial clout to buy all the best players and management expertise (and the lobbying clout to persuade UEFA to structure the "Champion's League" so that they get in every year, even if they haven't won anything), I would say it is the duty of referees to interpret the rules in a biased manner. The bias should, if possible, be approximately equal to the differential in money and power between the teams. So that means if I put together a Sunday league side to play Manchester United, I should be allowed 200 players on the pitch, my goal should only be 1 foot wide and my team should get penalties roughly every 90 minutes as a matter of course. 

Football would suddenly become interesting again. There is a similar system in golf. It's called "handicapping" (a rather offensive term, but then golf clubs never were known for being very PC) and it works rather well. 

I'll probably apply for a management job in FIFA armed with this theory. You never know. 

Who wants it? Leadership contenders and hopeless cases come out of the woodwork

Now that the media has decided swine flu is a big hype (gives them a chance to make big headlines when it comes back and bites us on the ass later in the year, but not the most helpful way of covering the story), we must be thin on news, 'cos there have been a persistent stream of contenders for the Labour leadership coming out of the shadows. 

First it was Salacious Crumb, aka Hazel Blears. Then "Harriet Hitman". And they also threw Johnno into the ring. (Great hand movements, Alan). 

I have to say this does look like yet another big hype from the media, with no real substance whatsoever. Yes, the government is down in the polls; yes, there's been one crisis after another. But so what? We've been here before. Nine to twelve months before, to be precise. Now it is just possible that if Brown hadn't had that spike in the polls after the initial banking bailouts in October, someone - maybe David Miliband - might have made a move for the leadership. At that stage, with 18 months to go to an election, there was a reasonable chance of making a stab at a policy platform for a new leadership and going to the country without the new PM looking like a complete gamble. 

But that was last year. Even if a leadership election was triggered now (an unweildy process involving trawling round getting signatures from dozens of MPs and then a full ballot of MPs, party members and trade unionists) the winning candidate would have less than twelve months before June 2010, which I think is the last date an election can be held. The whole thing would look extremely rushed and it's unlikely that an alternative candidate could perform better than Brown under those circumstances.

So it looks like a very poisoned chalice to take up, even assuming a leadership challenge could be successful (far from a foregone conclusion). But let's pick the ball up and run with it for the sake of intrigue. Who would be the best candidate for Labour leader? 

We can dismiss Hazel Blears and Harriet Harman straight away. The fact that Hazel Blears was right to criticise the Government's decision on the Gurkhas should not lead anyone - least of all The Guardian, in a strangely wrong-headed editorial - to conclude that she has any clue about policy in general. She couldn't even come higher than fifth in the deputy leadership contest, let alone carry the country in a general election. A total bullshitter, absolutely useless. 

Harman at least managed to win the deputy leadership, but only by being a complete opportunist - appearing to be anti-Iraq war until precisely two minutes after the campaign finished, where it suddenly emerged she had apparently been pro-war all along. Less useless than Blears, but not by much. 

Johnson would be a good choice: he avoids the worst aspects of both Brown and Blair, and is more likeable than either Cameron or Clegg. He's probably the guy that Cameron is most scared of. I still don't think he really wants the job, though. There are circumstances in which you can become Prime Minister without really wanting it (Jim Callaghan in 1976 comes to mind) but that normally only happens if the incumbent resigns. And can anybody really see Gordon Brown resigning before the election? Surely there's no way.

What's most interesting in a way is who isn't being mentioned at the moment. No-one from the younger generation: in particular, David Miliband has been absent from the discussion, which is in stark contrast to summer '08, where he was being viewed as the main contender. Why is that? This is already quite a long post and I want to move on to talking about the most likely - and/or desirable - scenarios are at the next election and afterwards - so I'll continue this v soon.  

Swine flu - it may not be that bad, but idiot journos could make it a lot worse

The media is of course full of swine flu this week. Unlike the virus - so far - the coverage is inescapable. By today, we were facing a pandemic of predictions, an epidemic of articles. 

Most of the TV coverage I've seen has been pretty good - Channel 4 News had Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, answering questions that had been emailed in by viewers, and it was quite in-depth and all very balanced and non-sensational. The printed and online media, by contrast, has been much more patchy. Most of the broadsheet reports have been OK but some of the columnists and bloggers have lost the plot completely. 

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian delivered an absolute pile of doo-doo today, arguing that panic over the virus is being 'stoked' by governments and the World Heath Organisation to justify increased budgets for disease management. There is a very strong argument for this view with regard to counter-terrorism budgets in the US and UK, but as regards a potential flu pandemic it's a completely ignorant distortion of the truth. Jenkins describes your average flu symptoms - "you feel ill for a few days then you get better." In which case why have 150 people died in Mexico City?

 So far, it is correct that the cases of the illness outside Mexico aren't fatal in the overwhelming majority of cases. But the early indications suggest that this new H1N1 strain of flu is substantially different from the normal seasonal flus which circulate every year. We simply have no idea how bad the impact might be outside Mexico. We might be seeing just the very small tip of a very large iceberg. When only a few people in the UK have been infected, there might well be no deaths at all. But if millions of people are infected, we may see a much higher death rate. As yet there is just no way of knowing. 

Jenkins says "professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling" but in fact the professional response as I have seen it in the media has been very measured and non-alarmist. It is certain sections of the media that are behaving unprofessionally by talking what they know is presumptious bollocks - suggesting that we know there is no risk whatsoever, or a very very minor risk  - whereas in fact we know nothing of the kind. It is sad that Jenkins, who is capable of much better journalism than this, should have dropped his standards so low on this occasion. 

I can't say the same thing about Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, because I have yet to read a single post he's made that isn't absolute crap. This guy wants to be Simon Heffer with a sense of humour. Sadly, he is a cheap punk impersonating an offensive moron. Or maybe he's just an offensive moron. Apparently no-one (except the very weak and infirm and people living in developing countries, for whom it was presumably a matter of social Darwinism anyway) is gonna die of swine flu. It's Simon Jenkins without the brains. One to avoid, methinks. 

And as for Michael O'Leary... this is a guy who shows such utter contempt for the human race that he is probably just a walking bag of nasty viruses disguised as a human being. Please, can someone infect this bastard, and put the rest of us out of our misery?

UPDATE: the day after writing this post I was lucky enough to find that rare thing - a balanced, sensible media article on swine flu by the excellent Ben Goldacre, author of the Bad Science blog. His view? We simply don't know enough to be able to make predictions on the severity of the outbreak or the potential body count yet - and anybody who says otherwise is a fool or a liar. Read this guy rather than the bunch of other duffers I've collected in this post and we might get somewhere...

Gurkhas - how many times can the govt shoot itself in the foot?

An embarrassing defeat for the government today over its plans to restrict the right of the majority of former Gurkhas to settle in the UK. The Lib Dems and Tories joined forces with rebel Labour MPs to back a Lib Dem amendment.

How did anyone in the government think that it was a good idea to try and pull a hard line on this? I have yet to find one person, of any political persuasion, who thinks that stopping the Gurkhas coming here is in any way fair. It seems pretty obvious to me that if you have served in the British armed forces then you should have the right to permanent residency in the UK. The government says it would cost £1.4 billion - fine, let's just put up taxes to raise the money. Could anybody seriously object? 

And well done to all Labour MPs who voted against the government on this - a full list here.

This makes an already unpopular government look ridiculous. And it's a huge PR coup for Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg. 

Government ministers need to try doing something popular for a change.