Another loss that will make many of us very happy

Last month it was Ryanair losing money; this month it's News Corp (formerly News International). A £2bn loss.

Yay! Every crunch has a silver lining. To paraphrase what the late, great Steven Wells said in the NME (about Rush, I think) in 1989: don't subscribe to Sky, don't buy the Murdoch press, and make the bastard poor. He deserves it.

Hal's myspace page has the right idea. I'm on myspace, but only to subvert the f***ers.

(p.s. do not take the 'interests' and 'details' sections too seriously...)

No way are the Barclays and HSBC results good news

More on this next week when I've got a bit more time, but just to say: Richard Murphy is absolutely right on the Barclays and HSBC results. Their results for bank lending to the personal and company sector were absymal (due to huge debt write-offs) - they made all their money on investment banking. Effectively they were making money by participating in the kind of financial gambling which brought about the current economic collapse in the first place.

And they're able to do it with impunity because they know governments will bail them out if they crash again. We should've nationalised the bastards when we had the chance. Never mind... a job for the next Labour government (hopefully 2015-ish).

A nice summary in the Guardian of how investment banking operations make money. Note that very little of it relates to activities which actually increase output in the real economy of goods and services - it's really about redistributing resources from one economic agent to another rather than creating new resources.

The Gary McKinnon tragedy exposes the lunacy of the US's war on terror

I haven't blogged about the Gary McKinnon case before, and I almost certainly should have done. Most of you will probably be familiar with the essential facts of the case; if not, I recommend the excellent article by Jon Ronson on the Guardian website.

Basically McKinnon is due to be extradited to the US to face a possible 60 years in prison for hacking into the US defence department computers - including the Pentagon network. As far as the US government is concerned, McKinnon is a terrorist who needs to be locked up as a threat to national security.

And if McKinnon really had intended to bring down the US government - planning something similar to 9/11, for example - I'd be inclined to say 'fair enough'.

But there's a small problem. Gary McKinnon is a UFO obsessive with Asperger's syndrome (an autistic spectrum disorder) who was hacking into the US network to search for information which he thought the US government was hiding about UFO propulsion systems. He had no intention of causing any harm to the US at all - he would have argued that his actions were in the public interest. (And if the information had really existed, he'd surely have been right).

He didn't find the information - presumably because it didn't exist. But what he did do was to expose a supposedly secure US military computer network as wide open to hackers. Ronson says, 'He wrote a script that searched for network administrators who'd been too lazy to change their user names from "user name" and their passwords from "password"'.

In a sane world, the US Defense Department would have said "it's a fair cop, guv", thanked McKinnon for exposing huge holes in their security arrangements, and maybe offered him a job as a cyber-security expert.

But unfortunately we - and Gary McKinnon - don't live in a sane world. We live in a world where governments go after easy targets in the name of "national security" to con the public into believing they are safe. And McKinnon is a sacrifice to that end.

As things stand, the US government is totally within its rights to demand the extradition of Gary McKinnon, and the UK government has to comply under the terms of the UK-to-US extradition agreement. It seems unlikely that the UK government will provoke a major diplomatic incident by refusing to extradite McKinnon. But there are alternative courses of action.

One option would be for McKinnon to flee the UK to another country which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US. All the EU countries seem to have one, but Ukraine, for example, doesn't. It would be worth finding some sympathetic Ukrainians who would be prepared to take the poor guy in. Life as a Ukrainian might take some adjustment for Gary, but given that the alternative is rotting in an American jail for half a century, Eastern Europe begins to look quite attractive.

Another option would be for a part of the UK to make a unilateral declaration of independence. The Isle of Wight has had a movement for UDI for some time, usually with the rationale of making it into a tax haven like Jersey or the Isle of Man. Becoming a protectorate for people like McKinnon seems a more worthwhile reason to secede from the UK somehow.

But something radical needs to be done, otherwise a guy whose only real crime was to take The X Files a bit too seriously will be spending up to 60 years in prison. And if you think that's fair, then there really is something wrong with you.

Could disaster for Labour be followed by an even greater disaster?

Not a very well phrased title for this post but the Telegraph has got me scared:

"Secret plan for Lord Mandelson to return to Commons in safe Labour seat"

If this story is to be believed (and that's a big "if"), Blairite MPs are hatching a plot for the Prince of Darkness himself to renounce his peerage and get the nomination to succeed Hilary Armstrong in the North-West Durham constituency and then make a bid for the Labour Party leadership after the election.

If this happened, I think it would be the end of the Labour Party. Full stop. Who the hell is going to vote for Mandelson? Tony Blair as a surrogate Tory made some sense in terms of electoral strategy when the real Tories were in disarray but now that they are back in business with Dave Cameron, Mandelson is largely surplus to requirements.

A Mandelson leadership would probably split the party, with the left going off to form a new party (Labour in all but name) with Mandelson left with a Blairite rump (Labour in nothing except the name). I think it would also mean a generation of Tory governments.

Which may be the real objective... because really, the Blairites were Tories all along.

RIP Sir Bobby

Another goddamn sports post...

I think it's fair to say that Sir Bobby Robson, who died today, was quite possibly the greatest English football manager since Alf Ramsey. There are others who might claim that title - Brian Clough or Graham Taylor, for example - and there are non-English managers of English clubs who have achieved even more - for example Alex Ferguson.

But Robson did an amazing job with Ipswich Town, who were a very middling club when he took over - I don't know if anyone else could have won the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup, and League runner up twice, with a club like that. Clough and Taylor are the only two real comparators.

As England manager from 1982 to 1990, Robson had the best record of anyone since Ramsey. The semi-final placing for England in 1990 was the best anyone has ever achieved for the team on foreign soil.

He also seemed to be a genuinely nice guy - respected throughout the game, and in hero in both Ipswich and Newcastle. That statue outside Portman Road is there for a reason, to be sure.

You'll be sadly missed from football, Bobby. We salute you.

Environmentalists under attack from the police state

For the last 15 years the Big Green Gathering has been the premier environmental festival on the UK circuit, attracting 20,000 people a year and featuring "Music, Dance, Crafts, Food and Farming, Healing, Earth Energies, Permaculture, Markets, Tipis, Fairground, Campaigns, Sustainable Homes and much more - powered by the Sun, the Wind and the People."

But not this year. Because the BGG has been cancelled on the instructions of the police:

Following threatened injunction proceedings in High Court by Mendip District Council supported by Somerset & Avon Police and having taken extensive advice from a prominent QC and other eminent lawyers, the directors of the Big Green Gathering have been left with no other option than to voluntarily surrender the license for the Big Green Gathering 2009.

The event will now not take place and the directors' advice and request is that no one intending to attend the event should attempt to do so, as the site is now closed and they are likely to be turned away by Somerset Police.

It is our intention to avoid any form of confrontation or public disorder in regard to this and it is our earnest hope that all those involved will follow this advice.

It is with great sadness that we have been forced into this position and we express our profound apologies to all those concerned.

In a scene reminiscent of China or Zimbabwe, the police state has decided that environmentalists should no longer be allowed to gather together like this as it's "unsafe" - despite the fact that it's been happening for many years without incident.

"Safety" in this case was being used by the police as a paper-thin pretext for their real motive - which is that they wanted to prevent a gathering of environmental activists in advance of the Climate Camp next month.

Whether the police are acting on their own initiative and the government has effectively lost control of law enforcement, or whether they are being pressurised to take these kinds of actions against environmentalists by the more reactionary elements of Nu Labor, is as yet unknown. What is clear is that environmental activists are now being singled out for discrimination and victimisation by the state on a regular basis.

I probably won't bother writing to my MP about this as he's a complete waste of space Tory and probably wants to lock up all environmentalists. I will be writing to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson to lobby for controls on the police so that they can't go round doing this sort of thing. Once the Labour leadership changes hands after the 2010 debacle, it's absolutely vital that the new leader takes a much more democratic and anti-authoritarian stance on civil liberties. If not, then the Green Party represents the only way forward in terms of Westminster politics.

And if there is one silver lining to this whole episode, it's that the Big Green Gathering is now much more 'on the map' than it's ever been - whilst disastrous in the short run, this dose of publicity could be vital in the long run for growing the event. I'll certainly be going along in future years. That is, of course, assuming that environmental events of this type are ever allowed in the UK again.

This whole debacle should also boost attendance at Climate Camp - although the police will of course be out in force, intimidating and assaulting people whose only crime is to want the world to still be a liveable place in 50 to 100 years' time rather than an asphyxiated oven.

National Express East Anglia: incompetent management + militant unions = misery for 100000s

Man, I'm so glad I'm self-employed these days and working at home most of the week. Otherwise I'd have been well and truly kyboshed by the NXEA train strike.

It's a joint RMT and ASLEF effort and it's massive. 48 hours this Thursday and Friday and the same thing for the next four weeks.

This really is putting a lot of people out very badly - people might be able to work around a 24-hour strike by staying in London overnight or taking a day working from home, but a sequence of 48-hour stoppages will test anyone's patience.

Predictably most media commentators will blame Bob Crow and the rail unions, and it has to be said that they're doing themselves no favours in the public eye by staging a long and disruptive series of strikes to secure a minimum 2.5% pay award at a time when a lot of shopfloor workers are facing pay freezes, pay cuts or even redundancies. (Although, of course, the NXEA management, as usual, have awarded themselves huge bonuses - if they were having to go without then their claim that the unions are being "unreasonable" would have more credibility. Update: Also, on the news, the ASLEF representative claimed that the unions were not seeking a minimum 2.5% pay offer - I will try to get to the bottom of this over the next couple of days). Most commuters will be incredulous that the unions and NXEA management can't sit down and hammer this one out.

But seeing this as solely the fault of the RMT and ASLEF would be a huge mistake. It's painfully clear to me from 5 years experiencing what NXEA tries to call a 'train service' that they haven't got a bloody clue how to run a railway most of the time, and to the extent that they do run it, they run it to screw the last penny out of the paying customer as much as possible. Some examples of their viciousness and incompetence:

• the 1908 service from London Liverpool Street to Colchester is, for no explicable reason, 4 coaches only. It is always full to bursting point, and very frequently people can't get on the service. This was pointed out to NXEA (who were then called 'One', but it was the same people running the company) as early as 2005, but have they done anything about it? No - it's still the sardine express. They claim they've got no spare carriages - so why not buy another f***ing train carriage you morons? Words fail me.
• a discount scheme for season ticket holders which allowed free travel on the network at weekends for the ticket-holder plus one extra person was scrapped without any explanation or compensation for season ticket holders 18 months after NXEA took over the franchise.
• Repeated overhead line problems on several evenings in the last few years have resulted in thousands of commuters being stranded at Liverpool St with minimal information on what was going on and few, if any, replacement buses.
• NXEA deliberately tries to overcharge customers by refusing to advertise the Network Railcard (which gives 1/3 off fares in the southeast and home counties) at their stations. You can get it if you know about it but they won't volunteer it to you even if you could save money by buying a railcard. I asked about this and was told it had been imposed as company policy.
• Like all the other London area train companies, NXEA have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into installing the Oystercard system, and then only from about 2012 onwards. It's been operational on the tube network and buses since 2005.
• Plenty of money has been spent on rebranding all the stations, trains and staff uniforms to 'one' (in 2004) and then to NXEA (in 2007) with no benefit to passengers whatsoever. At the same time, NXEA has refused to replace the 40-year-old intercity trains that run the London-Norwich route (and break down all the time) and has refused to put on extra trains to address congestion. But it's been very happy to hike fares by a lot more than inflation and to impose absurd evening restrictions on travelcard users and cheap day return tickets which mean that people can't travel back from London between about 4.15 and 6.45 pm.

NXEA management are, quite simply, a shower of bastards. Their managing director, Andrew Chivers, was on BBC East last night. Chivers has featured in this blog once before, under the heading "everybody do the Chivers chase", referring to a six-month period in 2007 where the local paper the Essex Chronicle were trying to track him down for an interview but the bastard was leading them a merry dance. On the evidence of last night's BBC East performance, the guy was in hiding because he's a charisma bypass zone. It was the most anodyne, drippy performance I have ever seen on TV. Even the lacklustre boss of Corby council, who appeared on the same programme trying to justify not apologising to some families who were exposed to toxic waste from a brownfield housing development on an old steelworks as a result of negligence by council-appointed building contractors, wasn't as crap as poor old Chivers.

Bob Crow and the RMT and ASLEF say that the NXEA management has treated them like shit and, whilst that doesn't in my opinion justify strike action on this level, if the way NXEA treats its employees is anything like the way it treats its customers, I can well believe the unions aren't exaggerating. Only the aggrandisement of the management and the dividend to shareholders seem to matter at NXEA - all else is a mere inconvenience.

The way forward is pretty clear: nationalise NXEA (this might happen anyway due to the nationalisation of National Express's other franchise on the East Coast main line - they are trying to say that the two companies are separate but that is such obvious bollocks that any sensible court will throw it out), and reinstall a management that actually wants to work with the trade unions to improve services. In the longer term, we need a structure put in place that minimises the likelihood of strike action. It's incredibly inefficient to have large parts of the economy grinding to a halt like this, and there's got to be a better way forward. Turning rail franchises into mutual companies - where the workers (and indeed the customers) have equity stakes and management roles in the company - would eliminate the conflict of interest between shareholders and the people who actually have to work in and use the service. If strikes were hitting workers in the pocket - which would be the case in a mutually owned model - we'd be far less likely to see this kind of industrial relations mess happening.

Tories want a repeat of 1981

Philip Hammond, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury (i.e. George Osborne's second-in-command) has obviously been watching too many episodes of Ashes to Ashes. (I never actually watched any episodes of it, because after watching the first episode of Life On Mars, I decided that John Simm was excellent but the Gene Hunt character was simply too repellent to be watchable).

Hammond said in the Guardian on Saturday that deep cuts would be wielded to satisfy the Standard & Poor's credit rating agency and prevent them downgrading Britain's debt status, which would result in billions of pounds of additional interest rate payments.

One very reasonable response to this is: is it right that Government policy should be dictated by a privately-owned credit rating agency? Certainly not, and it's just another example of how democracy under capitalism is largely a sham. But that's a wider topic, for another post.

The main point today is that Hammond is willingly repeating the mistakes of the early 1980s, when cutting spending during a recession vastly exacerbated its size and duration. Unemployment didn't start falling until 1986 - 7 years after the recession began. It's the worst case of economic vandalism we've ever had in this country.

And a repeat of the 1981 strategy would be even worse this time because the initial global recession is that much worse than the early 1980s - and with the US economy crippled, we can't necessarily rely on an upturn in global demand to pull us out of this one.

Fortunately, sane voices are now beginning to rise up against the cuts, and the weekend's papers saw thoughtful and reasoned articles on why cutting spending in a recession would be a ludicrous thing to do, by Will Hutton and William Keegan. Progressive bloggers like Richard Murphy and Paul Sagar also delivered excellent critiques of Hammond's approach.

We've already covered what's happening to Ireland in this blog - it's like Thatcherism x10 - and the Tories seem to want to turn us into the same kind of economic basket-case. The economy is not going to come off the list of most important issues anytime before the election, so if Gordon Brown were to focus on the Conservatives being a dangerous, economically incoherent party - the bastard sons of Thatcher - it might reap dividends. But of course to do that he needs to emerge from his present perpetual Brezhnev impression and actually get out there and kick some Tory ass. We'd love to see it, but is he still capable, or has all this "big tent" and "government of all the talents" shit left him permanently incapacitated?

Even if Gordon can't do it and the Labour party gets walloped, perhaps it doesn't matter in the long run. I'm now convinced that the Tories will make such a hash of things in office - and the global depression will run so long - that a united, well-led, progressive Labour party could romp home in 2015. Of course the question is whether we can get a united, well-led, progressive Labour party, and not a shower of shit. I believe we can but it's not going to be easy. But more on this as we get nearer the election and the pathway becomes clearer...

Reflections on the Norwich North byelection

Obviously a poor result for Labour in Alan Partridge-land - as if any of you were expecting anything else? And it's annoying to have to see TV pictures of Dave Cameron mugging to camera with yet another fresh-faced loonie Tory candidate.

However, I don't think it looks as great for the Tories as some commentators have predicted. There doesn't seem to be a huge wave of people crossing over to the Tories - they might of course be out there somewhere, and they might just not have bothered to vote this time out (turnout was only 45%) - but if this was an indicator of a Tory landslide I'd have expected to see more Tory votes. Of course, UKIP got 10% and they might go back to the Tories at the election - or will they? Telegraph blogger Ed West - a deeply sad presence on the web, with a beard to match - reckons that UKIP could be a real force if they wanted to be. I'm not at all sure that he's right, but in a way I hope he is, because if the right-wing vote were to split at the next election - something that was already happening in 2005 when Michael Howard was Tory leader - that would be a big help to Labour.

With heavy concentration (perhaps too heavy) on the Telegraph this morning, there's quite a good piece by Charles Moore, who is worried that the Tories aren't popular enough to win a general election - they are just relying on Labour being unpopular. I don't think Dave Cameron is quite the genius that Moore thinks he is - a smooth operator in the mould of Tony Blair, for sure, but any fool could be in front in the polls if he or she were leading the Tories at this juncture.

The main thing holding the Tories back is that people feel - rightly - that they haven't got much of a clue on economic policy. For sure they are ahead of Labour now when people are polled on the relative economic competence of the two parties, but then Labour have just presided over the biggest recession since 1929. But so far there has been very little coherence to Conservative economic policy - indeed very little policy, beyond a slightly more aggressive package of public expenditure cuts than Labour. George Osborne looks to me like an empty suit.

The Tories are massively helped by the crapness of Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader - something Charles Moore rightly identifies - and also by the continuing "imitation 70s Soviet leader" stasis of Gordon Brown. Every now and then, flashes of inspiration threaten to emerge from the great man, before he thinks better of it, and offers up meaningless platitudes to the camera. It is highly unlikely that he will be toppled before the election now - if it wasn't going to happen in June, why would it happen now? And that, really, is the Tories' best shot at an overall majority.

I am actually hoping the Tories do get in because that's a prerequisite for the huge political enema that needs to be administered on the Labour party - get the awful crypto-Tories and Stalinists out of the party and start building a genuine alternative political machine. I am waiting for this project to start - and hoping for a crushing defeat, but not SO crushing that all the good candidates for the leadership get voted out. Anything else - including another 5 years of Gordon - would merely prolong the agony.

Getting it very wrong on debt

On some previous occasions in this blog I have referred positively to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Daily Telegraph as a rare journalist with half a clue about what is actually going on in financial markets. This is because his tendency to say that the financial crisis is much worse even than it appears now chimes in with my gut instincts about what is going on at the moment.

However, in his latest article "Fiscal ruin of the Western world beckons", Evans-Pritchard has delivered a real turkey, showing a worrying low understanding of basic macroeconomics.

It's clear that something is very wrong from the start of this article. I quote:

For a glimpse of what awaits Britain, Europe, and America as budget deficits spiral to war-time levels, look at what is happening to the Irish welfare state.

Events have already forced Premier Brian Cowen to carry out the harshest assault yet seen on the public services of a modern Western state. He has passed two emergency budgets to stop the deficit soaring to 15pc of GDP. They have not been enough. The expert An Bord Snip report said last week that Dublin must cut deeper, or risk a disastrous debt compound trap.

This illustrates the fallacy of the conventional IMF approach to macroeconomics. As long as public spending and services are cut enough, the deficit will be eliminated and then everything will be OK.

Whereas in fact, in the current economic situation, the deficit is the key thing keeping the Irish economy from being in an even worse state. The emergency budgets have depressed demand for goods and services, depressing tax receipts and making the deficit wider - leading to calls for another emergency budget. And so on, presumably until the last Irish civil servant has left the building, and the country is in a state of anarchy.

Ireland is of course in more of a bind than the UK for two reasons: (1) it took a larger economic hit from the credit crunch (and hence has a bigger deficit as a proportion of GDP) and (2) it's in the Euro so it can't set its own interest rates and can't use quantitative easing to stimulate the economy (although as previously noted in this blog, it is still far from clear whether QE actually works or not).

Rather than engaging in an endless cycle economic self-harm to satisfy the IMF and footloose international capital, Ireland's best way out of the crisis would have been withdrawal from the Euro (and if necessary from the EU), and a combination of deficit spending to plug the cyclical gap and tax increases to plug the structural deficit. I'm amazed that there hasn't been a revolution in Ireland, given the cuts to public spending and benefits which have taken place. If Ireland was in South America the government would have already fallen. Maybe it's time to arm the workers out there.

Nomura's Richard Koo, who is referenced disparagingly by Pritchard, seems to have the right idea when he calls for a huge deficit spending boost to counter the recession. I have yet to read his book The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics (about Japan's "lost 20 years") but it is one of the next things on my list.

Of course it is essential that once growth resumes, countries run surpluses instead of deficits, to reduce the burden of debt interest - and this is where New Labour went badly wrong, because they had a structural deficit - but to call for huge spending reductions now is insanity. It would just turn the worst recession since 1929 into the worst depression OF ALL TIME and probably lead to the complete collapse of Western democracy and its replacement with fascist states under the control of people like the BNP.

Is that really what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wants to see?

another cricket post

I know I said no more cricket posts but...

WELL DONE GUYS. First win against Australia at Lords since 1934 - bloody hell.

It's feeling more and more like 2005 every minute. I keep worrying that Tony Blair is going to return and take over the country...

Best argument for leaving the EU yet

Check The Guardian:

Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

For Palin to become President, EVERYTHING has to go wrong

Sarah Palin resigned as Alaska governor last week in what even the Daily Telegraph called "a sometimes incoherent performance". It's not really clear why (I mean, why she resigned. It's clear why the performance was incoherent - because she's a 24-carat loon). Media commentators in the US suggest that if you are looking to clear the decks for a Presidential run, this is not the way you'd normally do it.

But could it be Palin in 2012? It would be so, so easy to take the piss (and I'm not averse to doing that sometimes) but more interesting, probably, to engage seriously with the idea for a couple of minutes.

There are two steps to this: (a) could Palin win the Republican nomination? and (b) could Palin beat Barack Obama?

(a) seems a damn sight more likely than (b). We should bear in mind of course that there are 2 and a half years to go (which doesn't seem that long actually...) before primaries start, and some brilliant new Republican star might emerge as the obvious choice. Such a sudden discovery of a star candidate two years before the election hasn't happened that many times before, though. OK, so Barack Obama was a fairly new face on the political scene in 2008 but he had already been marked out as 'one to watch closely' when he won election to the Illinois Senate in 2004. John McCain was very much an old stager when he got the Republican nomination. You could make a case that Bill Clinton was a relative unknown in 1992, but I think you'd have to go back to Jimmy Carter in 1976 to find a true 'dark horse' candidate.

Ruling out a new face for now, who are the main other contenders? Mitt Romney looks like the frontrunner - although not particularly appealing to the Republican hard-right, that doesn't matter particularly as those people would vote for anyone on the Republican ticket. The Republicans need the moderate centre to win, and Romney probably stands best chance of delivering that. Mike Huckabee is basically Sarah Palin with less lipstick, better jokes and a more fluid guitar style. Louisana Governor Bobby Jindal ruled himself out for the moment by giving one of the worst speeches ever when responding to Obama's inaugural speech, although he has plenty of time to rehabilitate himself.

Assuming that Palin could become the hard-right frontrunner (which is not automatic, but certainly possible), she is likely to become the nominee in one of two circumstances. First, and probably most likely, is the situation where the economy recovers enough for Obama to run for re-election on having saved the US economy. Some success in achieving health care reform and US commitments to greenhouse gas emissions would also help here. In these circumstances Obama would be a total shoo-in for 2012 and it is likely that the moderates in the Republican party would not even try to contest the nomination particularly hard, preferring to put a hard-right winger in as a fall guy/girl in the same way Barry Goldwater was used in the Johnson landslide of 1964. Of course in theory the Republican right could reason the same way and endorse a moderate as the fall guy, but because so many of these right-wingers are foam-at-the-mouth loonies who believe any election can be won as long as you repeat the same hackneyed anti-abortion anti-gun control agenda as loudly as possible, they are more likely to seize the opportunity, poisoned chalice though it be. So Palin could certainly get the nomination in these circumstances, but she'd almost certainly be annihilated in the election.

The second scenario is that Obama makes an almighty hash of things (or at least, the right manage to convince the US public that he has done) - the economy continues to tank, health care reform and climate change targets get voted down by the Senate - and there is a massive backlash against the Democrats in 2012. This could enable Palin to win the nomination and the election in 2012 - in a very similar way to the way Reagan was able to beat Carter in 1980. I think this is an outside possibility but an unlikely one; the political climate does not seem to be pointing towards the hard right as we approach the 2010s in the same way it did at the end of the 1970s. Partly it's a historical thing: by 1980, the post-war social democratic settlement (called "liberalism" in the US) seemed to be exhausted and decrepit whereas now, the neo-liberal era that began in the 1980s looks in much the same state, and there has been a shift to the left (in policy terms across the globe, and in voting intentions in the US although not yet in Europe).

I still think Huckabee looks more electable than Palin even in that situation though. He does a better impression of Stillson from The Dead Zone.

Afghanistan: let's get the hell out

Just watching the Newsnight special on Afghanistan. Amazingly, 46% of the population appear to think we should hang on in there, if recent polls are anything to go by. The original rationale for the conflict - beating the Taliban and installing a democratic government - mutated several years ago into a desperate holding action to avoid the Taliban taking the country back by force. The recent spike in UK troop deaths - awful to be sure, but a small fraction of the number of Afghan citizens to be killed - has brought home the insanity and futility of the conflict. Of our political leaders, only Nick Clegg has sussed out what is obvious to any rational observer; that the conflict is unwinnable at current levels of troop deployment, and - unless the UK or someone else is willing to commit the hundreds of thousands of extra troops and billions of pounds that would be necessary to turn Afghanistan into some kind of military police state - the best thing for us to do would be to pull out.

We invaded Afghanistan because George W Bush was looking for an easy popularity boost after 9/11 and his puppet, our glorious North Korean fascimile leader Mr Tony Blair, took us in with the Americans. The nature of Afghanistan's terrain - an extremely mountainous environment perfect for guerilla warfare - meant that although displacing the Taliban regime in Kabul took a matter of weeks, that did not, by any means, mean "mission accomplished". The Taliban forces (and, if the videotapes are to be believed, Osama bin Laden) merely retreated into the mountains, holed up for a couple of years, and then, as troops levels were run down after the US and UK became tied up in a second war in Iraq, the Taleban started gradually retaking the country.

And now we are in a situation where, unless we boost troop numbers and equipment stocks significantly - an increase in expenditure which we can't afford and which the MoD isn't equipped to deliver - we're bleeding our armed forces dry, throwing good money - and troops - after bad.

What's the answer? Legalisation of heroin would not be a complete solution but it would cut out a massive source of Taliban revenue. Stopping all the Bushite bullshit about the "war on terror" would also help. The war on terror is now 8 years old and the Taliban are stronger than ever. What we need is not a war on terror, but an ideological stand against extremist religion, both at home and abroad. We need to call sexist homophobic b.s. for what it is whether it's in extremist Islam, wacko evangelical Christians, or the leadership of the Catholic church. But we're not gonna convert anyone to moderate beliefs with guns in our hands. That's for sure.

The test match format is a stupid anachronism

Right, here's Hal Berstram getting back to what was once his primary assignment - the sports desk - with probably the only post I'll ever make about cricket.

The first test in the 2009 Ashes series - in Cardiff - has just finished. The result was a draw.

An exciting ending, with Monty Panesar and James Anderson hanging on until the end of the day with England on 9 wickets down...

...but also a travesty. Because Australia were much better than England and deserved to win.

So why didn't they win? The bleeding weather.

Any fool can draw a game where a substantial proportion of the playing time is lost to bad weather. It's absolutely ludicrous that test cricket was designed so that the unpredictabilities of the British weather played a key role in the process.

You might as well say that if the rain comes down at Wimbledon, the championship is "drawn" for that year - don't bother to reschedule the lost playing time, just give up on the whole thing. Or if a football match gets postponed due to bad weather in the Premiership - just draw it and give the teams one point each.

Sounds ludicrous - and it is. But this happens every year in test cricket.

I don't particularly like cricket anyway, but at least the one-day game gives a result (even if play has to be abandoned due to rain, they have a nifty thing called the Duckworth-Lewis method - sounds a bit like a dodgy form of contraception, but is in fact an algorithm designed to impute the winners from a partially completed match. Clever stuff.)

It would actually be fairly simple to change the test match format to guarantee a result; either play as many extra days as necessary until both sides have completed 2 innings (or, often more likely in England's case, they've gone down to an innings defeat) or play the bloody game under a stadium where they can close the roof if it rains. Given the crappy British weather you'd have thought someone would have sussed this out.

But of course cricket, like most sports in this country, is run by morons, and so the idiocy persists. Please someone knock me out with the cricket ball until it's all over. ZZZZZZ....

I can always rely on the US right to cheer me up

Very busy, tough week this week, hence the lack of posting. Just a constant wall of work... pretty much all done for the weekend, though.

Paul Krugman really cheered me up with this post though. There is apparently a chorus of voices on the US Right comparing Obama to Hitler... for example Republican senator Jim DeMint says:

we're about where Germany was before World War II when they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuala. People become more dependent on the government so they're easier to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that's where their security is.

And DeMint is of course absolutely right about the danger, in some respects. The US has, very recently, been in a situation where the 'votes were just power grabs' - in both 2000 and 2004 the election was stolen by vote fraud by the two-bit thief and criminal George W Bush.

There was also two guys who was pushing the national security agenda so hard after 9/11 that large swathes of the US public - almost enough to win the 2004 election without voter fraud - kept voting for more government because "that was where their security was" (so they were told). The guys' names? George Bush and Dick Cheney.

So congratulations Senator DeMint, you've done a good job of nailing down what was so awful about the previous administration that your party perpetrated on the American people. Replace all your present tense sentences with past tense and the paragraph is a classic of political history.

Looking back at the Bush/Cheney era from the (relative) safety of the Obama years is a real trip. It would be easy to forget how bad they were: what a ham-fisted, reactionary, moronic shower of crap the American people had to endure for eight fucking years because they didn't have safeguards in place to prevent systematic vote fraud and the corruption of the media by Fox News. Even if Obama turns out to be a halfway incompetent failure as a president (which I sincerely hope and believe he won't be), he'll still be a bloody hero by comparison. Same with Jimmy Carter: a laughing stock at the time, but despite the fact that the guy got a lot of things wrong, he looks like a goddamn genius compared to the people that came after him. Who was the first major world leader to take environmental policy and renewable energy seriously, for example? (Clue: it wasn't Ronald Reagan.)

But it's of course not enough to be right in US politics: to avoid calamity, you have to be successful, and it is still far, far too early to say whether Obama is making the grade. It is a subject which this blog will be returning to time and again over the next few years. But for the weekend, I leave you with a Maryland Republican women's group and their thesis that "Obama is systematically destroying the American economy and with it AMERICA [capitalisation in original]." Maybe Michael O'Leary writes these people's web posts for them? Could be.

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.