The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

I've been planning this post for weeks, if not years, and I feel confident that some of it will (unusually for my posts) draw sympathy from all sides of the political spectrum who read this blog. As the title is based on an episode (the final episode in the Penultimate series) of the Original Doctor Who, let me take you back in time to when I was struggling in London, stuck in an impossible job and commuting upward of 3 hours every day from one benighted part of the Capital (Hanger Lane) to another. (Hackbridge)  The date, specifically is 7th July 2005, and the Metro Freesheet I pick up from the newsagent outside my house contains the nauseating spectacle of one of the most hated figures of the last 30 years, Ken Livingstone pictured alongside David Beckham celebrating Britain's victory in its bid for the 2012 Olympics. Screwing it up in disgust, I threw it on to my car's front seat and, set off on the drive, not to my normal workplace but to the far nearer Greenford site, for a session on my then employer's new appraisal system. About thirty minutes into the session, a New Zealander working at the office said that the Underground had been shut down due to 'unspecified power failures'. The rest of the day's events will for anyone in the UK at that time need no further redaction, my abiding memory is of trying about 20 times from the smoking shelter at the site to get through on my mobile phone to find news of one my relatives, and when finally making contact via a free landline learning that he had stayed home and the feeling of relief washing over me, mixed with a degree of guilt that the families of 56 other people hadn't been so lucky.

Home to the News and obviously the news that we had won the Olympics was relegated to at best, the front of the Sports Pages, together with various prominent politicians expressing their regrets and sorrow over the incident. It is indeed, unfortunate that these two incidents happened in such quick succession, as the horrific impact of the bombings had a tendency, completely understandably, for the 18 months following it to overshadow the ongoing Scandal of the Olympics themselves being awarded to London. To fast forward the story nearly two years: A close Friend's wedding in Mexico presaged from me, having read innumerable horror stories of Travellers' ordeals at the hands of the USA's Transport and Security Administration, on an almost frantic search (as Direct flights had run out) to find a way to get to Cancun, in Eastern Mexico without going through the United States. After an increasingly desperate trawl of almost every European capital (I even looked at Moscow!) like Newton being struck by an apple, it dawned on me what language the Mexicans speak... and I was easily able to find direct flights from the moronically not until that point checked Spanish capital of Madrid. This was one of two cities (the other being Paris) which had narrowly been beaten by London to host the games. Upon my arrival in Madrid in April 2007, it was clear that the government, even having lost, had carried out much of the work outlined in the bid. Getting round the city, even as a non-Hispanophile using a Collins mini-guide and bastardised French-pronounced Spanish seemed effortless. Coming (and at that time mercifully having got out of) from three years in London, it seemed incredible that the Spanish Capital could have been viewed as inferior, and it seemed well ahead of where London's preparation at that point was, even having lost out on the bid to host them!

Ever since the link between the Bombings and Olympics bid has been made more distant by the passage of the time, I have been a staunch opponent of them being awarded to London. It transpired within less than a year, that the Bid organisers, at best naively, and at worst fraudulently though that the Construction costs of the games weren't subject to VAT, leading to an increase in the cost of an estimated £2.5 billion. In fairness, in the wake of this, a variety of UKIP bloggers (this was before the near-universality of Facebook and Twitter) estimated the cost overruns would run into £20 or £30 billion. Mercifully for the organisers, these figures have turned out to be exaggerated, but independent research still has the cost at a staggering £9 billion, which makes them the most expensive Games ever.

So like the Timelord himself, let's come crashing into the present, and as the helpful Official Site points out, (and probably by the time this post is finished it'll be less) there are now 9 days until the Opening Ceremony, and the 'Greatest Show on Earth' begins. My abiding memory of the last Olympics, held in Beijing, was the by then London Mayor, Boris Johnson, shambling on to the stage behind a Retired Routemaster as China 'handed the Games over' to the UK, and thinking, it'll come around sooner than I think - and here we are, or aren't as later paragraphs will reveal.

Of course between that point in 2008 and 2012, there has been a hell of a lot of water under the bridge: A huge economic crisis, and a change of government (Indeed it's two Prime Ministers since we first got the games!), and also a sea change in media reaction and the inexorable rise of Social media. I might have just made it onto Facebook, I think when the Beijing Olympics were on, but I had certainly barely heard of Twitter, and of course thought it basically a tool for following the meanderings of Stephen Fry, rather than a genuine revolution in the way the news is now filtered.

So here we are in July 2012, with the Olympics now days away, and as though outlining the Dramatis Personae of a play, let's introduce a la Romeo and Juliet, the two key 'factions' in this little drama - On one said, we have the sinister sounding LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) and on the other the oft mentioned here Coalition Government. Suffice it to say, the play, thus far looks like being a combination of comedy and tragedy.

1/ Revenge of the Trolls

Anyone writing on Twitter or indeed any Social networking site will be familiar with the existence of Trolls: Indeed entire websites are devoted to following the best of them. A troll is defined (quite loosely) as someone who writes deliberately inflammatory, provocative or offensive comments on a blog. I've even been described as one myself by several prominent Left of centre bloggers. Nevertheless, they are a fact of life out there in cyberspace, however much people dislike it. I even follow a number of them on Twitter. Into this dangerous minefield LOCOG stumbled like a drunkard enforcing the highly contentious Olympic Games Act 2006, one of Blair's last before he yielded to Brown. It gives LOCOG the power to potentially prosecute people:

'using prohibited terms. Under the OSPA (1995), these include but are not limited to...'the Olympics', 'Paralympics' and Olympic Rings... but also under the Olympic Games Act 2006 ... the terms 'LOCOG' , 'London 2012' , 'Team GB' or any images, logos or graphics relating to them.'

'As well as these terms prohibited from use by anyone other than official partners but also companies that produce unauthorised products bearing similar words – plurals, translations, deliberately misspelled etc. – are likely to be fined with directors of the firms liable to prosecution.'

Now, whatever my or your opinion of the Trolls, as the Kernel Mag article linked to above points out, they tend to be libertarian or anarchic in nature. As well as being often bigoted and profoundly offensive to many people of delicate sensibility,  they also don't take kindly to be pushed around by nameless, faceless bureaucrats. Their reaction was a fairly predictable one as seen here, here and here. Don't forget this is also based on my extremely limited exposure to about 300 users - god knows how many other Trolls have got similar Spoof avatars! So LOCOG have made the classic mistake of using a 'Sledgehammer to crack a nut' and have merely succeeded in at best looking antagonistic, and at worst, like total chumps.

2/ Give them a sporting chance, surely?

I think anyone who thinks the Olympics are any longer about the Sport can only be under 16 or possessed of a staggering naivete which would suggest they won't survive long in this world. On a trip back to the UK I was watching a Daytime TV programme wherein an 'Anti-Olympics' protester was being interviewed by former Relay Silver medallist Iwan Thomas, and was outlining the reasons behind this movement - Watching the 'face of the protestors' it seemed I was transported in my mind to a UK Uncut group destroying Fortnum and Mason - the same stale, Marxist claptrap, almost enough to make me sympathetic to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and LOCOG. I was instinctively on the side of the Athletes, who it must be said are not entirely culpable for what has become a modern-day circus. however, in the cold light of day, the anti-Olympics people, including such luminaries as our Old friends Richard Murphy and Owen Jones, prove the old adage 'Even a blind squirrel stumbles across the odd acorn': As the quite disparate figures of James Delingpole in the Telegraph and Nic Cohen in the Spectator make clear, it is truly nauseating to see the following examples:

Olympic Gold medallist Sally Gunnell forced to switch Tracksuit colour and remove the Union Jack flag from the photoshoot of an advert promoting EasyJet's new London- Southend service

Hanley's Florist  in Stoke- on - Trent threatened with prosecution over putting a display of Flowers in the Shop Window in the shape of the Olympic logo - as the Florist himself rightly says 'Who in Stoke- on - Trent gives a stuff about the Olympics?'

Stopping a London bound bus for four hours on security grounds because someone had sparked up an electronic cigarette - An interesting choice of weapon for potential terrorists to be sure.

I'm sure other people could add Legions of examples - The truth is that the Olympics have now become so dominated by Large corporations that the sport is entirely a secondary, some might even say tertiary consideration.

3/ The idiots themselves

And so on to our next Primary player in the drama - This Coalition government, which is against stiff, (and I must confess, I thought insuperable) competiton from its predecessor rapidly leading the field when it comes to fiascos and incompetence. The week began with Theresa May breaking the news of a Security scandal involving PFI beneficiaries GPS. Apparently the firm had no idea how many guards it could provide for security, pointing to a lack of trained personnel. The upshot of this is that the already overstretched army and Police force have had to supplement the security. Then on Monday, following the news that the M4, previously closed for two weeks following revelations that the main elevated sections had serious defects , the hated M4 Bus lane, the brainchild of John Prescott , was reopened as a ZIL lane for the Olympic duration. This caused the expected 28 miles queues going into London. Combined with the revelation that the Olympic Park isn't even ready, the impression is, however hyped up by the Press, of a government, and by extension a country, in total disarray.

Thus my initial anger, that Madrid, which I know would have been both more than capable of holding a superb games, and was fraudulently denied by either incompetence or wilful deception on the part of the Original bid team, has now turned to slight depression that the Eventual denouement of the Olympics themselves will confirm Britain's collapse to Third World status, and that the abiding memory of the Olympics will be that like their predecessors in 1948, they were characterised by austerity and 'muddling through'. The difference being in 1948 we were holding them in the wake of the worst conflict the world has ever seen. What is the contemporary excuse? it's a truism that no-one likes a smartarse and I hate to say I told you so, but the truth is 3 years of living in London (2003 to 2006) when the population was half a million people lower than it is now convinced me in no short order that London was an entirely unsuitable place to hold the games. It's sad that that conclusion is being borne out in the unforgiving glare of the new Social Media world...

Army of One

I have to echo the sentiments of my co-blogger, and (to use an American aphorism) come to the realisation that there have been more debates between the candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential election than certainly posts I have managed to come up with, and most likely than the number of posts combined this year. I can't even muster the excuse that I have been busy trying to survive in the face of the ongoing austerity programme of the Comedy coalition government. Nevertheless, there is obviously a need to try and at least emulate last year's meagre total so for the third or fourth time this year, I need to make a concerted effort to reverse the trend.

Where to begin - Well in terms of material I'm like a rabbit hunter in the fields of Northern Maine, but with the bulk of the readership of the blog (a dwindling band) at least partially in the camp of Hal Berstram politically,  perhaps time to reconnect with a sporting post. The ongoing fiasco that is Olympics 2012 merits a post all of its own, though it will require more than the time my domestic duties allow me today. Perhaps more entertaining, and the reason behind the post title, is the comic situation relating to Scottish football.

Army of One was the final episode of Season 3 of The Sopranos, and recent events over the better part of this year have exposed Scottish Football as being effectively now a one team monopoly, built on a House of Cards - an elegant summary of the potential state of the English game if certain trends that Scotland has magnified are not quickly dealt with by the authorities. As any Football Fans will no doubt be aware, Scottish football has, even for its more devoted supporters, been for decades the relative equivalent of watching paint dry, with the so-called 'Big firm' of the twin Glasgow clubs of Celtic and Rangers dominating to the extent that not since nearly my first season as a fan (1984/85) has another team won the League title there. Despite the clubs clamouring for a greater share of the Television Money following their English counterparts and setting up a 'Breakaway' Scottish Premier League in 1998, the two club dominance of the Glasgow two has continued, with Old Firm games being by far the most watched (and incidentally the most split along Sectarian lines in the British Isles)  and most physically attended.

Sadly, the game in European terms is now so dominated by the spectre of the 'Champions' League' , that the Two Glasgow clubs have looked on enviously as whilst they were devouring the relative toddlers of their fellow Scottish clubs, their European ambitions have come to look decidely forlorn, especially when, as in the current season, Teams from 'Smaller Leagues'  such as Sweden, Slovenia and even for the delusional, Portugal proved a bridge too far in both the revamped European competitions. After the hubris, at least for one has now come what the Greeks termed 'Nemeis' and as a result one of these 'titans' now lies, almost in ruins.

The donwfall of Glasgow Rangers could probably provide enough material to keep a filmaker busy in the cutting suite for the thick end of two years, but at the end of the day, the reasons are, I think clear enough. Desperate to cling on to past Glories, the Board spent money it didn't have chasing the elusive chalice of the 'Champions League' (and not even the most ardent fan would presume that a Scottish club could have or indeed would have been allowed to win it) and salaries skyrocketed to levels that mere domestic competition couldn't begin to pay for.

The coup de grace was signed in February this year, when an unpaid Customs and Excise bill of over £9 million pounds put the club into administration, and the ongoing investigation revealed overall debts of £134 million, making the club insolvent and last month, Customs issued a winding up order and effectively the Original version of the most successful Football club (using Domestic success as the barometer) in the World ceased to exist as a going concern.

Events subsequent to that point have reached levels of farce that would have gladdened the heart of the late Tommy Cooper. A ludicrous sounding entity, Sevco 5088, effectively a shell company appears to have taken over the 'name' of Rangers. Despite petitioning for entry to the Top tier of the League, their bid has been rejected, and those numerous clubs outside the top tier (Anyone who recalls listening to the football results either on the Radio or on the now departed Grandstand, or indeed who ever played the football pools will be familiar with the names for the most part!) when presented with the options voted for the new 'Sevco' team to be put into the Third tier. The resultant shakeup means that the bookmakers have now installed cross town rivals Celtic at a staggering 33/1 ON to win the title. (Bookmakers no longer appear to offer 50/1 or 66/1 on strangely) I'd advise anyone with a substantial sum of Disposable capital over,say, £60,000 to make their way to the Bookmakers to invest it as soon as possible. though the old adage, 'There's no such thing as a sure thing' is one bearing in mind, I cannot see barring an Act of good any of the meaning teams even being within 25 points by the season's end, and with a ZIRP still being followed by the calamitous coalition administration, you're likely to get a better return than keeping it in the bank.

Naturally reactions to the fiasco (and I have some sympathy with the players who are otherwise, relatively speaking,  innocent victims) have varied. Several Rangers fans have publicly stated they will have nothing to do with the new entity if it is in the fourth tier, whilst a minority (a not insubstantial one) has said that they will stage a boycott if the team is NOT put into the Third division! More interesting is the reaction of the parties both in the Third Division itself, together with the reaction of the Scottish FA and the remaining Premier League Division clubs.

The latter teams have warned that if the Rangers team is not placed immediately into the First Division (One below the Premier) the decision could lead to a Domino effect, as the following story outlines, with five of the remaining 12 clubs looking at administration inside a year, and most believing that they wouldn't survive the year in their current form. The reason for this is that Sky TV, which has provided much of the funding for the Scottish Premier, has said it will pull the plug on its Scottish Television coverage if Rangers are plunged into the fourth tier. My response is: If you're that dependent on TV money, then you're not a viable business and you need to cut your cloth accordingly.

What is the long-term future for Scottish football? Well, the national team having been a fairly permanent fixture in my youth in both World Cups (1982, 1986, 1990, 1998) and even the Euros (1992 & 1996) has not qualified for an international tournament in over 13 years, and as already mentioned their European performance in the bastardised Club competitions has continued to slide still further. This despite living on a diet of Sky Money, expensive imports and aping all the razzmatazz of their English equivalents. I'd say the death of Rangers, and possible mass bankruptcy of smaller Premier League rivals could see genuine community clubs emerge as possible viable business models. If 6 or 7 teams fell out of the Premier League a la Sevco, then teams that have had for years to exist as part-time small clubs might have a taste of potential glory, rekindling local interest and encouraging a much wider talent base than merely the 'Big Two'. The ramifications for Scottish football (and it's by far the biggest sport up there) could be profound. English football fans, amongst whom I count many readers of this blog and its co-authors, need to look with interest at the fate of the Scottish League because given the inherent unviability of our Top tier domestic football and the far greater wage inflation rampant in the Premier League, it's no mean stretch to argue that the Premiership could quite easily also become an Army of One, unless steps are taken to remedy excessive dependency on Sky Money......

House of Lords reform: nice idea with little chance of happening (this time)

It's hardly the most important issue around at the moment (and that may be part of the problem) but for what it's worth, here are my thoughts on reform of the House of Lords - both what I think should happen, and what will actually happen.

Given the undemocratic nature of the House of Commons due to its idiotic "First Past the Post" voting system (which allowed Tony Blair's Labour Party to form a majority government on only 35% of the vote in 2005), it's very important to have a second chamber with some capacity to delay - and possibly block - legislation which it considers to be not up to scratch. I'd argue that the current House of Lords does not perform this function effectively. Partly that is because there are a lot more party apparatchiks (including a high quota of tedious reactionaries from all three parties) in there than the defenders of the current set-up give it credit for. But more importantly, the blocking function has been whittled down to almost an irrelevance under this government. The Commons can use a mechanism known as "financial privilege" to stop the Lords introducing amendments to legislation. Previously this was only used for Budget-related legislation (e.g. the Finance Act) but the ConDems have extended it to (potentially) any legislation which might impact on the public finances (which is just about any legislation at all, of course). See, for example, what happened earlier this year on the appalling "Welfare Reform Bill" (aka the abolition of social security for working age adults bill.)

So the House of Lords is now emasculated to the point where we have a de facto unicameral legislature. This would be somewhat concerning even if the House of Commons had a democratic and accountable electoral system. With First Past the Post it's a recipe for disaster. What we need, really, is a second chamber with substantially more revising powers than it currently has - and also, perhaps, with the power to initiate legislation in certain policy areas.

My ideal system would be for PR voting for the House of Commons - perhaps through a system similar to the one used for the Euro-elections at the moment (7-member constituencies operating on party lists) with a different system used to elect the Lords (perhaps First Past the Post in very small constituencies - maybe 1,000 or so of them). That way, the Commons would be truly representative of the public vote, but the Lords would have local "micro-mandates" and would be able to raise local issues effectively. It might also be good to set a higher threshold for the Commons to be able to overcome defeats or amendments to legislation sent back from the Lords - for example it could require 60% of MPs to vote to overturn a Lords amendment rather than the usual 50%.

Given that we are unlikely to get PR for the Commons any time soon, PR for the Lords makes sense - although this then results in the odd situation of the second chamber being more representative than the primary chamber, which seems kind of topsy-turvy. I'd push hard for a PR Lords to acquire as much procedural clout as possible, given that it would have more of a democratic mandate than a FPTP Commons.

Turning to the prospects for Nick Clegg's Lords Reform Bill, it looks pretty dead in the water to me. Labour will be voting against the programme motion setting a limit to the amount of time allowed for debate, and it looks like there are enough rebel Tories who are going to vote with Labour to ensure that the Bill drags on and on, gets filibustered and finally talked out. Charles Kennedy has accused Labour of "playing political games" but this isn't a very effective criticism, frankly, because given the sheer destructiveness of the ConDem political agenda, it's no surprise that Ed Miliband is jumping at the chance to f*** up the timetable for the rest of their appalling legislative programme. It's the only honourable thing to do. Charles Kennedy, by contrast, needs to spend some time thinking about just how it is that a once progressive political party - the Liberal Democrats - has been produced to annihilating itself providing lobby fodder for the Tories.

I think we will see Lords reform soon; but it will be under Ed Miliband's first administration sometime between 2015 and 2020. But if the tendency to use financial privilege to override any amendments which the Lords make to legislation persists into future parliaments, it isn't going to matter much WHAT system - if any - is used to elect the second chamber. It'll still be a completely toothless talking shop.

An example to us all...

...I'm very pleased to alert readers of this blog (if there are any left after a 3-week layoff, and less posts this year than dodgy banker scandals) that my friend Chris Brooke is back as an active blogger at the Virtual Stoa. Chris is always a quality effort and serves as an example to us all: it's time to dust off the PC, stop eating Pringles and get yer ass in gear to write some serious blog. Good luck to ya, Chris.

I will be doing a few posts on minor topics like the forthcoming collapse of the banking system, the € and Dave Cameron's quiff over the next few weeks. My output has been abysmal this year, partly because I was working my ass off until May, then took a long holiday, and then I was easing back into it. So easy, in fact, that I did f*** all electronically speaking.

There is so much to say and I'll certainly fulfill a quota of posts in July/August... but my medium term ambition is to set up a new blog, probably under my real name, as I think I've taken giroscope about as far as it can go. Van Patten will of course be free to carry on here as long as he so wishes, and we may introduce other writers as well.

But anyway, do check Chris's blog out... it's excellent.

Ed Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Moans

Firstly, many apologies for being inactive on the blog for almost a month. I was on holiday for a few weeks and then it took a while just to get back in the groove of things. I've got a lot of stuff to catch up on, so the next couple of weeks will (hopefully) several posts, and many of them will be on the long side. But increasingly I'm using Twitter for the soundbite stuff and so this blog will be picking up the slack on slightly longer, polemic-style, outings.

So, without further ado.... what a difference six months has made for Ed Miliband. At the end of last year, with the Tories temporarily in the lead in the polls due to David Cameron's ludicrous "veto" in Brussels, you could tell that the Labour hard right were sharpening the knives. This anti-Ed activity was covered in some detail in my previous post "The Bantam Menace" - referring to the rather small size of the threat Ed faced. I always thought it was unlikely that Ed would face a challenge this side of the next general election, even when the Tories were marginally in front, because the Labour right - who have (mostly) hated Ed ever since he announced he was standing for the leadership in May 2010 - had no obvious challenger. The most high-profile right wingers at cabinet level are Liam Byrne, Jim Murphy, Stephen Twigg and Caroline Flint, none of whom look like they could attract enough support across the Labour leadership electoral college to beat Ed. Other torch-bearers for the Labour hard right are mostly in the Lords (e.g. Adonis, Mandelson) or have retired hurt from front-line politics (Milburn, Purnell). Very few of the visible faces in the new crop of MPs look like Blairite right-wingers, either. And the original great hope of "continuity New Labour", David Miliband, crashed and burned so spectacularly in 2010 that it's unlikely he would ever want to put himself through such a gruelling process again.

So in short, it is looking rather desperate for the Labour right in terms of a direct challenge to the leadership, and has done since October 2010, really. Progress (surely the most Orwellian misnaming of a political grouping ever?) realised very early on that, lacking a candidate of their own for the leadership, their best hope was a "Manchurian candidate" figure - a pliable centrist who could be leaned on to be more receptive to hard-right ideas than Ed is. In terms of "big hitters", Ed Balls was out because despite largely agreeing with the Labour right on financial regulation (i.e. we don't really need it, despite everything we've seen since 2008) he's too statist and too Keynesian, and too  arrogant, to be a conduit for Blairism. Also, he performed dismally in the 2010 leadership election Yvette Cooper on the other hand, who had stayed out of the 2010 election in deference to Balls (her husband), was a distinct possibility. And so last year we began seeing a wave of pro-Cooper articles from Dan Hodges and the like. The idea was that the anti-Ed barrage would build to a crescendo if Labour's performance in the local elections in May 2012 was as weak as May 2011, building momentum for an autumn 2012 challenge from Cooper.

The strategy failed dismally, largely because Labour stormed into a poll lead of around 10 percentage points in the wake of George Osborne's extraordinarily botched Budget of March 2012. This laid the ground for a good - although not exceptional - local election performance for Labour. The one beacon of hope for the right was that Ken Livingstone's defeat in the London mayoral contest would prove a big blot on Ed's copybook - but this doesn't seem to have happened, largely because Ken's sheer eccentricity as a candidate this time round has led to him taking personal blame for the defeat, with Ed largely insulated from criticism.

Instead, Ed has been consolidating his position - something that's much easier to do now that shadow cabinet elections have been abolished and he has control over appointments. Key allies in the 2010 intake like Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna have been quickly promoted to the shadow cabinet, Balls has been brought inside the tent and is performing reasonably well as Shadow Chancellor, and last month the Blairite Liam Byrne was replaced as head of the unweildy and labyrinthine Labour policy review by leading "soft left" thinker Jon Cruddas. It is this last event that symbolises the intellectual exhaustion and capitulation of the Labour hard right. Reduced to arguing for Labour to become an anaemic "lite" version of the ConDems in pamphlets like Policy Network's In the Black Labour, they have been caught completely unawares by Labour's improvement in the opinion polls, and would probably have started to fade away completely had it not been for the rather ham-fisted intervention of the GMB Union, which attacked Progress at its annual conference, with GMB general secretary Paul Kenny promising to submit a motion to the Labour Conference in the autumn which would "outlaw" Progress as part of the Labour party in its present form. This was, frankly, a daft intervention, which makes Progress look like martyrs being hounded out of the party by the union paymasters. As things stand, Progress is yesterday's organisation. Just as the high point of the hard left within the Labour party was Tony Benn's narrow defeat to Denis Healey in the 1981 deputy leadership campaign, which was followed by a long period of decline for that faction, similarly the high point of Progress was David Miliband's narrow defeat to Ed in 2010. Progress is an organisation on a downward curve. It has considerable funding from Lord Sainsbury and various corporates, but is being progressively marginalised by Ed Miliband, and will probably be only a minor force, with a couple of token cabinet members, in the next Labour government. The GMB's interests would be best served by letting Progress continue its slow decline rather than giving it publicity and a moral high ground it doesn't deserve with comedy motions to "outlaw" it.

On holiday

Hope blog readers are enjoying the thoughts of Van Patten... I'm currently in the middle of a 3-week holiday in the US and will hope to post some thoughts from this side of the Atlantic soon but to be honest, after a very strenuous start to 2012, I'm really trying to recharge the batteries at the moment. Stay calm and normal service will be resumed soon.

Shades of Grey

Which was the 48th episode, and the final episode of the Second Season of Star Trek: The Next Generation,  and essentially consists of about 10 minutes of new footage involving one of the actors lying on a bed in a set interspersed with Clips from previous episodes. It's widely considered one of, if not the worst episode in the entire Star Trek pantheon. I was moved to write by the latest offering from the already mentioned Owen Jones, who, having left the sanctity of the Guardian to move across to the other fount of predictable idiocy The Independent has, in the face of strong competition, produced what has to be the most idiotic article I think I have ever read in any supposedly 'respectable' newspaper.

The articles byline is 'If Socialists really did run the show then working people would benefit' and as already stated the sheer number of inaccuracies and calumnies within an article is, I think unsurpassed in the history of 'quality' journalism. There's probably too many to list not to make this the longest article in the site's history, but I'll do my best:

'When I glanced at the Telegraph's front page later that day – which revealed that multi-millionaire Tory donor Adrian Beecroft had accused Vince Cable of being a socialist – I realised it must have been Karl Marx spinning violently in his Highgate Cemetery grave. The great man shouldn't take it to heart:'

In fairness, it's questionable whether a man should be held to account for crimes committed in his names after his death but I am moved to quote the late Lewis Namier, who was moved to inquire of the brilliant philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, when informed that the latter intended to compose a treatise on Marx as to why he was studying such a Poor thinker and one so blinded by class and racial hatred. However, given how influential (Disastrously) his ideas have been, to describe him as a 'Great man' (in the sense that Possibly Hitler and Stalin were 'Great men') is not beyond the realms of possibility.

'....it does demonstrate how "socialist" is regarded as the ultimate insult by much of our wealthy elite, who have been in a virtually uninterrupted triumphalist mood since Margaret Thatcher defeated their political opponents in the 1980s'

From reading this you might think (as indeed my co-blogger might well argue) that Thatcher gained her victory through franchise restriction and use, possibly of paramilitary forces to vanquish her and, by definition 'The elite's political opponents'. Never mind she won thumping victories both in 1983 and 1987, winning a majority of voters in the C1 and C2 Sociological demographics,two strata referred to quite frequently (and witheringly, for the most part) by The Guardian as 'Thatcher's children'. I can only assume that from Jones' perspective, these people, often amongst the early self-employed, small businessmen or employees in parts of the Public Sector where Union Leadership had had their restrictive practices curtailed by the Employment reforms of Norman Tebbit , would not be classified according to his eccentric world-view as 'Working people'

'In what was fortunate timing for Thatcher's acolytes, the Soviet empire began disintegrating as her project reached its climax. Although almost all socialists abhorred Stalinist totalitarianism (by the 1980s, at least), these were regimes that described themselves as "actually existing socialism". Their collapse was portrayed as the final discrediting of socialism, and the ultimate vindication of capitalism.'

Given that even the most Conservative estimates of the extent of Warsaw Pact influence within the Public Sector, Civil Service and other prominent parts of British civic life puits the number of COMECON country agents at around 15,000, it is something of a stretch to make the statement that 'Almost all Socialists abhorred Stalinist totalitarianism'. Besides which 'Uncle Joe' had been dead for almost three decades by the time Thatcher came to power. If my blanket use of the terms 'Soviet sympathiser' and 'Sino/north Korean agent' is to be disproved (and I apologise to readers as they have been over-used) then at least one should distinguish between the Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev eras. As is so often the case with Journalists of the Left, the absence of historical context is truly shaming and shocking.

'Beecroft's use of "socialism", then, relates to a theory called the "Overton window", which describes what is seen as politically acceptable at a given time. Rather than having to engage in a debate over the merits of bosses being able to dismiss their workers at will, an opponent can be dismissed as a "socialist", which – for Beecroft – is code for "extremist" or "someone with views outside of what is politically acceptable".'

A theory which is used regulaly in debates by (not Jones himself, curiously, which is to his credit) journalists of the Left to circumscribe debate on a whole raft of issues, most prominently race or sexual orientation - almost any mainstream politician daring to question the status quo that we need to do something to put limits in immigration into the UK has to lace such a statement with caveats and platitudes about ' the contribution diversity has made to the country' lest he be branded 'racist'. Similarly on the issue of Climate Change (Or Anthropogenic Global Warming), currently under severe pressure, the term 'Climate Change denier' is regularly bandied about. The issue being that unlike Socialism, neither 'Racism' nor 'Climate Change Denial' can put 90 million dead across two countries in their debit column. Forget Al Gore's vapid meanderings on the state of the planet. This is the real 'Inconvenient truth' that the Left would like airbrushed out of history.

'If socialists really were running the show in Britain, they would be building a society run by, and in the interests of, working people. Our banks – propped by the British people – would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole. Our booming wealthy elite would be forced to pay a fair share of tax (or, in some cases, any tax whatsoever)....'

Again here, he hits on a partial truth - the banks shouldn't have been baled out by the taxpayer, for if markets are to work, however imperfectly, then there has to be the possibility of failure. Sadly it was the previous administration, by firstly propping up Northern Rock for heavily political reasons, then intervening in the difficulties of HBOS and RBS who set in tow the kowtowing to the Banks, who know that whatever their misjudgements, the taxpayer will now act as backstop.

I also like the idea that the Banks under state control would 'act in the interests of society as a whole' - And just who decides what that interest is? Are we going to have referenda on interest rates (for example?) Which well-paid coterie of bureaucrats will decide 'the popular interest'?

'After the disastrous failures of market economics, real socialists would be taking our utilities – such as the railways and rip-off energy companies – into social ownership: not old-style, statist nationalisation, but democratically run by workers and consumers. They would bring down welfare spending, not by kicking people at the bottom, but by building social housing, introducing a living wage, and creating jobs. And they would be reversing the scandalous lack of rights that workers have in the workplace, which is what ensured that wages were declining for many before the crash had even happened...'

What I find amusing here is that Jones (I suspect) is too young to remember the situation in the 1970s, and certainly too young to remember the 1945 to 51 government - which was a genuinely impressive administration, easy to knock with the benefit of hindsight but filled with ministers who had served patriotically during the warf, and with a genuine concern for working conditions and familiar with pre-war deprivation which the modern LEft have, frankly zero familiarity with. The Industries were taken into Public ownership with the intention of running them 'democratically'. That was quickly hijacked by the Unions themselves, who took over acting in the interests of producers, rather than consumers. A quick look at the scene today sees (for example) the London Underground, which is already partly in Public ownership, and under 'Workers control' - a scenario meaning a job that for the most part mechanisation should already have removed is paid a base salary of £59K. Is Jones saying that's the kind of wage levels he wants across the economy? It sounds like a rekindling of Tony Benn's laudable but ludicrous idea of a 'siege economy' to prevent Britain being battered by the then relatively nascent Capital markets, or at worst, something like the reaction of Apartheid South Africa in the face of global economic sanctions - Build up our own industries heedless of what is going in the outside world.

As I said in the previous post on Murphy, I wouldn't normally consider either party worthy of such detailed comment, but as these are two intellectual scions of the Ed Miliband Labour Party, I think it's worth seeing the level of intellectual rigour and total failure to understand historical context or even take a cursory look at history before coming out with suggestions. Ironically one thing both contributors lack is the realisation that things aren't always black and white - and in between, there are many Shades of Grey....

Mr. Murphy's Greenhouse Stone throwing

In my 10 months or so on Twitter, which is arguably responsible, at least in part for the paucity of posts here which I am forever seeking to rectify, I have encountered a myriad group of 'Twitterati': the Good, the learned, the Bad and the downright offensive. However, aside from a spate of so -called 'Pornbots', I have never felt it necessary to Block anyone who has cause to disagree with me. Nor have I had much cause, despite some strong words at times, to be blocked by anyone bar two Leading Tweeters, the baby-faced (and, sorry to say, Rather immature, at least in terms of his real-world experience) Owen Jones and the almost megalomaniac self-styled 'Number 1 economics blogger in the UK', the Norfolk - based former tax accountant, Richard Murphy, author of the tome 'The Courageous State', and rumoured to be one of the Leading advisors on Tax policy and overall economic outlook of the (potential) incoming Ed Miliband Administration in 2015. I think my jibe at Jones when he made a reference that with the death of North Korea's Kim Jong-il, 'Robert Mugabe's Christmas Card list was getting a bit shorter' to the effect that I'm sure he was still on it probably rankled but I know for a fact I am not the first to get the 'blocking treatment' from Murphy. This very cocksure blogger likes to boast about his advocacy of a 'Courageous State' but his courage doesn't seem to extend to allowing dissenting voices to post on his blog or indeed even follow his Twitter feed, thus rendering his credibility immediately suspect.

Arguably his most prominent and incisive critic, is Tax exile and ASI writer, Tim Worstall, disparagingly referred to on Murphy's blog as 'Tim Worstofall' (Such cutting edge humour..) who regularly blows holes in Murphy's master plan, much to the chagrin of my fellow blogger (who collaborated on the Courageous State) . Unlike Murphy, Tim operates a fairly open access policy on his blog and critical comments there don't tend to be banned or silenced, a policy I'd argue is far more courageous than Murphy's almost medieval inquisition-like 'silencing' of counter-voices.

Anyhow, ranting aside, I wouldn't normally pass comment on anything Murphy has to say, only that to anyone taking a passing interest in Global economic news of late, the situation in Greece is becoming increasingly desperate. Mired in a downward spiral of falling demand, cuts in expenditure and prisoners of a massively overvalued currency, rumours persist of people foraging through bins for food, together with reports Many businesses have folded with many more on the brink and of children being abandoned to churches due to their parents being unable to afford to feed them. With the situation in Greece being so intrinsically linked to Europe, and a perfectly titled episode of Star Trek (Plato's Stepchildren) available, a more lengthy post on Greece is surely in the offing, but what took my eye on the 'Tax Research UK' blog was this almost unbelievable piece by Murphy on how Greece can effect recovery.

A few choice examples of how misguided the man is:

'The present emphasis on export-led growth as a key solution to the Euro crisis, whilst benefiting successful economies like Germany and China, will not be enough to enable the rest of Europe to deal with its collapsing effective demand.'

Which obviously begs the question as to where the money to pay for anything is going to come from for Greece in the First instance, with other potential 'Exit nations' (Spain, Italy and Portugal waiting by the door) - But, wait, here's the answer....

'the European Central Bank (ECB) should immediately announce a Green Quantitative Easing (QE) Emergency Programme for Greece. It has been estimated that there are more than 4 million households in Greece and so its first investment should be 9 billion Euros spent on fitting free solar panels for the occupants of one million south facing roofs in Greece, and a further 4 billion Euros to train a ‘carbon army’ to install energy saving measures in all Greek homes'

And where exactly is the skilled Labour going to come from, Richard? who is going to be training them? and more importantly who is going to be controlling them? Murphy appears to be advocating, in effect that the EU continue its policy of treating Greece like some satrapy from the Middle-Ages. Arguably the most shocking incident thus far seen in Greece was 77 year old Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in Athens' Syntagma Square, with a strongly-worded letter condemning the austerity pursued by the 'Tsolkagolou' government - a reference I needed to look up to explain. Georgios Tsolkagolou was a Colonel in the Greek Army who signed the surrender of Greece to NSDAP forces in World War II and was tried after the war for treason. Is Murphy suggesting that another government programme imposed (or seen as being imposed) from Berlin will be acceptable to the Greek people. I cannot read Greek but those of my correspondents that can warn the language being used to describe both the former Papademos government and the EU itself by the Greek press is inflammatory and laced with references to the German Occupation of 1941 - 45.

Also, Murphy displays his profound ignorance of the EU, which for ordinary Greeks has become synonymous with a cosy coterie of Private businessmen (who, to give him credit he will condemn) and CRUCIALLY, senior Bureaucrats, both within the Greek State and at EU level (which, due to some misguided belief shared by my fellow blogger that all Public servants have a saint-like lack of self -interest and all Public expenditure is axiomatically good he won't) who have carved up the contracts and much of the resultant money that Greece has received since joining the EOK (Greek for EEC) in 1988. The money for his solar panels will simply disappear into the same well of corruption and nepotism that it has done over those intervening two decades.

'Of course, a Green New Deal is only part of the picture to regenerate Europe. Face to face caring and wider infrastructural renewal such as housing, schools, hospitals, water and sewers systems and maintaining the local road networks will provide the backbone for a labour intensive transition for most countries. The personal care can be paid for by the state, particularly once domestic and international tax dodging are tackled. With some modest state pump priming, the majority of the funding for the rest of the infrastructure programmes can be provided by pension and insurance funds and from personal savings via bonds. The secure returns that can be earned from such investments are just what such funding sources need. The local jobs and business opportunities provided will help rebuild the tax base and allow for an eventual reduction in public debt.'

Despite Murphy's insistence that tax havens are the problem, Greeks facing down the consequences of refusing to leave the euro have been piling their money OUT of the country. Even former Communist neighbour Bulgaria, itself no paragon of economic and bureaucratic virtue is seen as a relative safe haven, with huge deposits flowing in to those unable to afford to deposit in one of Richard's prime Bete noires, Switzerland (prosperous, DEMOCRATIC and with a limited state that seems to work quite nicely for them - no wonder he dislikes them so much) Again, the infrastructure projects thus far funded by the EU have been in many cases catastrophic(Visit the Parthenon if you want evidence of this), and Good luck using either Greek bureaucrats themselves or more likely, foreign 'Independent' Tax experts to chase down tax evasion, which in Greece, due to corruption is seen as a National Sport.

In short the article completely misses the point on almost every level. It show almost zero knowledge of Greece or the Greek psyche, no respect for national boundaries or Freedom of choice and overweaning arrogance characteristic both of the Man's blog and his Twitter feed (what I can discern of it since being banned) I have said that the state most like the 'Courageous State' that I can see in historical terms is the now -defunct USSR. In advocating a key rule for that unlamented behemoth's Spiritual successor, the EU, Murphy has unwittingly (or more likely unashamedly) showed his totalitarian side. Lord help us if he has any influence over an incoming Ed Miliband administration

Enjoying the post-election fall-out

For a left sympathiser such as myself there was much to cheer in the local election results and things have only got better in the couple of days since... I'll just pick out a few bits and pieces that struck me in particular:

• For the first time in living memory I actually underestimated how well Labour would do. I thought they'd get about 500 seats, lose Glasgow and Ken would lose to Boris narrowly. In the end they picked up over 800 seats - which led to the hilarious spectacle of Baroness Warsi saying Labour needed to win 700 seats to be credible, then upping the figure to 1000 when she was informed that Labour had already gone over 700. Ho ho. And they held Glasgow. 
• Ken lost to Boris, but not by much. Considering the number of own goals he'd scored, the massive bias of the press against him, and the attacks on him by his own side, being only 3% down after 2nd preferences was a pretty good effort. The fact that it was much tighter than the opinion polls suggested made it harder for the Tories (or indeed the Blairites) to spin the result as a disaster for Labour. 
• Ed Miliband emerges immensely strengthened from these elections and is now almost certainly safe until 2015. It may even be that some of the Labour right stops thinking about ways to get rid of him and starts trying to think about ways to win an election. He can but hope. 
• The fall-out from the results in the Tory camp has been hilarious. Badge of honour has to go to Nadine Dorres who is a total loose cannon, making the anti-Blair plotters of 2005-06 look completely tame. Did any Brownite Labour MP give an interview as incendiary as this at that time? 

More on Dorres: I agree that the Tories could probably find 46 signatures for a leadership election quite easily. Just look at some of the right-wing wackos on the backbenches and that's obvious. Whether an alternative candidate could actually beat Cameron is another matter. I don't really feel qualified to pronounce on that as I don't know what the average Tory activist thinks about Cameron nowadays (and remember the Tory leader is chosen by a run-off vote among party members, not MPs). It's possible, I suppose, although as Cameron has only really hit a bad patch in the last 2 months or so, I would be surprised if the party didn't give him more time to turn it around. If I were a Tory right-winger I'd be tempted to bide my time - if Cameron loses in 2015 then the right-wing would have a clear run at taking over, either through a fresh-faced hard right winger like my MP Priti Patel (god help us) or through the proven populist right-wing Trojan horse that is Boris Johnson. If Cameron wins in 2015, the right also has leverage - they can basically turf him out if he doesn't sign up for a hard-right programme. In fact my guess is they won't need to - Cameron is basically a right-winger on most issues (except gay marriage) and is currently operating concessions to the Lib Dems only because the parliamentary arithmetic means he has to. 

Turfing Cameron out this side of Christmas would present the new right-wing Tory leader with a problem; assuming the Lib Dems abandon the coalition at that point (which they surely would - they're spineless collaborators but they're not (mostly) fascist assholes), how is this new model Tory govt going to pass any policies? It would be a minority govt. The PM couldn't dissolve parliament early because he/she needs a 2/3rds majority under the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011. So you see, there really is no viable right-wing alternative to the Coalition. What would probably happen is that after a few months of stasis, the Lib Dems and Labour would unite to pull the plug on the whole sorry affair... pass a no-confidence vote, refuse to form a govt for 14 days and then there would be a dissolution and an early election. 

So my prediction is that Cameron will survive until 2015 whatever the right thinks. But it's great fun to watch the Tory party tearing itself apart (or bits of it anyway). Meanwhile, Labour looks more at ease with itself than at any time since about 2001. Not an outcome many of us would predicted even a few months ago. 

Tomorrow is Yesterday

My fellow Blogger has posted his thoughts on yesterday's Local Elections in the UK, and has unsurprisingly focused on the London Mayoral Elections, which seem to be the single bright spot in an otherwise fairly dismal picture for the Coalition. More on the wider ramifications, which are a direct result of the questionable Budget on which I posted what seems like an eon ago, later in the week, but it's perhaps worth considering the scale of the Johnson achievement, which comes in the shadow of A:/ A pretty dire performance by the Conservatives within London even in the 2010 Elections where they were the largest party and B:/ In the face of National polling data which has seen even the much-maligned Ed Miliband presiding over a 13 point (at maximum) poll Lead, which has led even Erstwhile and somewhat tiresome Former Statesman blogger Dan Hodges to damn him with faint praise. ( 9.30pm London time: Warning - Lest I speak too soon - It appears the result is considerably tighter than predicted - it looks like it will go right to the wire. However, the basic critique remains valid although were Livingstone to win the ramifications for those unfortunate enough to live in London would require a separate post)

As my colleague has pointed out, anyone wanting to see the scale of Ken's achievement in managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of what would have seemed certain victory need only follow Andrew Gilligan's blog in the Telegraph which gives an almost daily dose of bile for those able to stomach it. This has been derided on the Left as a 'smear campaign' which given the outrageous calumnies against Boris seen almost Daily on Twitter suggests either a distinct lack of Irony or failure to take account of the phrase beloved of the late Peter Cook, 'Mote and Beam , sir, Mote and Beam' (Based on the Biblical quotation from Matthew 7:3)

'Why beholdest thou the mote that is in your brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye'

A quote the increasingly desperate bloggers such as Owen Jones  and Sunny Hundal  (who appear willing to forgive almost any outrage if it gets a Labour victory) would do well to bear in mind.  One can only imagine the reaction had Johnson made some of the verbal gaffes that Ken had. Who can forget this classic piece from the Ultra Left Compass think tank which would have touched the heart of the Late Joseph Goebbels with its use of selective quotations, dissimulation, out of context quotations and innuendoes back when Johnson first became a mayoral candidate in 2007? Given the state of the election, I'm surprised this wasn't used as a Bible for journalists to attack him!

As Hal points out, Livingstone's failure will have almost zero ramifications for Ed Miliband - he's considered as much a maverick by many across the political spectrum as was George Galloway, and if anything, I think Miliband will benefit from having, as far as possible kept a discreet distance from his candidate's antics.

So, what is the secret to Johnson's success?:

1/ He has kept a relatively Low profile throughout the campaign - A Savvy campaigner who since an unsuccessful bid for Parliament back in 1997 has an excellent track record, I think he quickly evaluated that Ken would do himself enough damage that his best bet was to keep quiet and leave discussion until the debate, where the visceral mutual loathing would do as much damage to Ken's campaign as to his. This lack of gaffes (and he has a track record here in terms of putting his foot in his mouth as anyone from the Liverpool area will testify) served only to magnify Ken's errors.

2/ The Labour Party managed to hang itself with a singularly unsuccessful and arguably the weakest candidate they could possibly have put in the field. Anyone who has lived under Ken and who worked in the Private Sector would have had no difficulty remembering Ken's record, which was to introduce huge tax rises with almost nothing in return except for a regular diet of Political propaganda, and procure contracts for his political cronies at, again , great expense to the taxpayer. His much-vaunted congestion charge merely had the effect of shifting commuter traffic outside the zone and made private motor transport the preserve of the rich. It is very hard to conceive of a single positive aspect to his period as mayor and suffice it to say, although I had fled London to the West of England by that point, the celebrations which followed Johnson's victory led to a less than productive Friday. Had Oona King been selected as candidate, given here popularity with Ethnic minorities and women, it would have been a tall order for Boris, even with a considerable cult 'Personal' following to overcome her.

3/ Although Boris has arguably been less effective than many hoped, he does possess a certain charm that sets him apart from the Coalition - various appearances on Have I Got News for You  combined with a carefully cultivated image as a shambling , quasi-cartoonish character has done much to negate the 'Tory contamination' that has affected almost the entire rest of the coalition and gives him a certain cachet amongst the apolitical voters especially. This, combined with his relatively calm persona in the face of quite vicious hatchet jobs from the Left has done a great deal to provide a personal bounce factor which has negated the otherwise dire Poll ratings for the Tories. By contrast, as I have pointed out to Hal, Ken's ruthless 'coalition-building' and effective use of Private Sector workers as cash cows for his political projects has led to an 'Anti-Ken' coalition (No prizes for guessing I was a member) of people who vote for anyone but Ken. Although many have left London for pastures new, I'd say only the BNP has a more polarising impact than that man.

(Update 10pm London Time - the last few thousand ballots are having to be counted by hand due to a failure of the counting machines, Don't you just love modern technology?)

Updated thoughts on today's elections

With many people going to the polls today for the local elections, I thought I'd update my previous advice on the London mayoral race, as well as offering a few predictions of what's going to happen on Friday.

It seems to me that Ken is probably going to lose - which has very little to do with his policy platform, but is rather a combination of two personality-based factors: (1) Boris Johnson appears to have a certain buffoonish appeal to a swathe of voters that disconnects him from national dislike of the Tories, and (2) a proportion of (people who would otherwise be) Labour voters are turned off by Ken to the extent that they won't vote for him.

The 'Boris factor' would probably give Boris a certain boost no matter who he was running against, while the 'Ken factor' would depress Ken's ratings no matter who he was running against. But it's the combination of the two that proves deadly to Ken's chances.

This suggests that Labour would be doing better with another candidate - one with less baggage - and I think that's the case. Oona King, for example, would probably have been in front at this stage, and Boris contemplating a return to Westminster.

The "tax avoider" slur, in particular, has hit Ken really hard. There is some truth in it - to the extent that everyone who sets up a company and pays themselves partially in dividends (which don't attract National Insurance liabilities in the way earnings do) is a tax avoider. In other words Ken is doing the same thing that millions of other people who are self-employed do - paying a lower tax rate than employed people. It's worth noting that even if he were registered as a self-employed sole trader rather than a company, he'd still be paying less tax than if he were an employee, because self-employed National Insurance is considerably lower than employee plus employer rates. In his current employment situation, the only way Ken could pay tax rates equal to what he'd pay as an employee is if he paid out all the income from his company (Silveta) as his earnings rather than dividends. But this logic would suggest that anyone who takes dividends rather than earnings is a tax avoider - so the Tories are left arguing the Marxist line that the return to capital from the production process should essentially be zero, and the return to labour should be 100%. It's a funny old world. Of course, if we had a system which was neutral between the taxation of earnings and dividends, then this issue wouldn't arise. But there you go.

My previous post indicated that if I were in London I wouldn't vote Ken. That's still true on first preferences, but on second preferences, with the race so close, I think I'd have to put him second, despite my misgivings. The guy is severely flawed, but at the end of the day, the priority is to keep Boris out. My first preference would be for Jenny Jones of the Greens.

My predictions overall are for Labour to get around 500 seats, for Ken to lose, and for Labour to lose Glasgow council to the SNP. The latter two will be treated as calamitous by the Blairites in the media (Wintour and Watt, Rentoul, Dan Hodges etc.) who have had thin pickings for their "Ed is crap" campaign of late; but the fallout from London and Glasgow is unlikely to damage Ed, simply because he's had little to do with either fiasco. Ken Livingstone was chosen as the London mayoral candidate before Ed even became Labour leader, and his poll slide is the result largely of unforced errors by Ken himself, coupled with a hugely hostile media - nothing to do with Ed. Similiarly, although I am no expert on Scottish local politics, as far as I can tell the Glasgow problem is also a result of serious problems in the local Glasgow Labour party which are very much below Ed's pay grade. I mean, if the loss to the SNP in the Scottish Parliamentary elections last year didn't result in a putsch against Ed - at a point where Labour was doing much worse in the polls than it is now - it's hardly likely that Glasgow council elections are going to precipitate some kind of uprising now, is it?

I also predict that any fillip to Cameron from a Johnson win will be short-lived - the Johnson/Livingstone duel is a one-off, with no real relevance to national politics except that it establishes Johnson as a formidable operator and campaigner who will move one step closer to being the next leader. But that factor could weaken Cameron in the long run a lot more than it helps him. If Dave looks like a surefire loser in 2015 we can expect to see Boris campaign for a parliamentary seat in the May 2015 election (amazingly, the Mayor is allowed to serve as an MP at the same time, as long as it's for no more than 6 months), get elected and then resign the mayoralty to stand for Tory leader. And given the collection of duffers currently jockeying for position in the Cabinet, it seems unlikely he won't get it, should he want it. Interesting times indeed.

Ken Livingstone, dinosaur machine politics, and the case for change in London

I have spent rather too much time towards the back end of this week following an entertaining, but at the same time philosophically deep, Twitterspat between the erst-while uber-Blairite Telegraph (and ex-New Statesman) blogger Dan Hodges and various other Labour bloggers and Twitterati from the left, right and centre of the party (including Owen Jones, Eoin Clarke, Mehdi Hasan, Luke Akehurst and Hopi Sen) concerning the merits of Ken Livingstone's campaign to win back the London mayorality from Boris Johnson. And specifically, whether Ken should be supported just because he's the Labour party candidate even if you have serious misgivings about him as a candidate.

Unusually, I find myself in a certain measure of agreement with Dan Hodges on this issue... in that I don't think Ken deserves the automatic support of Labour members, let alone the wider left or centre of London politics, just because he's currently the main challenger to Johnson.

We need to get something straight about what Ken isn't, first of all (and I'm speaking as someone who voted for, and donated money to, Ken in his independent mayor bid of 2000 - the last time I was eligible to vote in a London election - and who was also an enthusiastic supporter of his re-election bids in 2004 and 2008). He is not a "hard-left" Labour candidate; if anything he is a maverick centrist, who enthusiastically endorsed most of the New Labour agenda while he was mayor. That's not to say his two terms as mayor were particularly bad; on the contrary, he made many good innovations, including congestion charging, low public transport fares (at least on Oyster cards), the Oyster card itself, and the rather nice red "ON" in the "MAYOR OF LONDON" posters. But this was back in the day when he was mainly focused on policy, rather than making an increasingly bizarre sequence of unforced errors, for example:

• making ludicrous, borderline anti-semitic allegations about London's Jewish voters (as Jonathan Freedland has pointed out in an excellent article in the Guardian).
• emulating George Galloway by hanging out with a selection of reactionary and homophobic religious leaders (as pointed out by Nick Cohen, for example).
• making unwise remarks about denying the vote to tax avoiders - unwise because on some definitions Ken is a tax avoider himself (I will be devoting a specific post to this as it is important to clear up confusion about what "tax avoidance" consists in, but suffice to say for now that the right-wing arguments that Ken is a tax avoider DO have some validity, and the issue is a time bomb which has exploded in his face at just the wrong time).

The sad thing is that Ken's policy platform is basically sound - on transport policy, reinstating EMA, and many other areas. But he's become an electoral liability to the Labour campaign. I've been arguing for several months now that Ken was going to win this election - albeit narrowly - because he only lost by 6 percentage points in 2008, and Labour was at least 10 points down in the national polls then. Logically, with Labour now 5 to 10 points ahead in the national polls, Ken should be in front of Johnson by at least 10. But instead he's around 5 points behind. I think if Labour had chosen Oona King to be selected as mayoral candidate in 2010 rather than Ken, she'd be kicking Boris Johnson's ass (and god knows, that bastard needs to have his ass kicked).

Some people - notably the brilliant left-wing Labour commentator Owen Jones - have argued that there is a right-wing media conspiracy against Ken. And yes there is, but the Tory press EXISTS to put the boot in to Labour candidates by means fair or foul. Labour's failure to reform the media to make it more balanced despite several opportunities to do so from 1945 onwards ensures that - at least until the next Labour Govt - Labour candidates are going to have to struggle against a tidal wave of lies, bullshit and smear operations. So, given that we know that, isn't it a hostage to fortune to put Ken Livingstone -a very articulate politician, but also a guy who is often the rhetorical equivalent of a cluster bomb - in the hot seat? Why not go for someone less gaffe-prone?

There's then the final line of defence, which is to say that Ken should be backed just *because* he's the Labour candidate. One of the reasons I'm not in the Labour party is this kind of dinosaur machine politics, which has in recent years been mainly been the preserve of the Blairite right, but which elements of the Labour left are now showing they can do just as well. My view on this is quite simple: supporting Labour candidates who aren't worthy of the role is a bad idea. It degrades, and in the end is likely to destroy, the Labour party. Tony Blair wasn't worthy of being PM by 2005 and no way would I have advised people in Sedgefield to vote for him then. I'd have backed Reg Keys. Likewise, I don't believe Ken Livingstone is worthy of being mayor in 2012. I don't have a vote so this matters not a jot to the election itself, but if I did, I would be voting Jenny Jones of the Green Party as 1st choice on the ballot.

And who knows? If Ken continues to disappoint in the next couple of weeks it's quite possible that Jones, the Lib Dem Brian Paddick or the indepedendent candidate Siobhan Benita could start to move up in the polls. And then things might start to get really interesting.

EXCLUSIVE: Introducing Beige Labour

Following high-level discussions between several antagonistic factions across the Labour Party, which have been kept out of the news over the last few days due to Pastygate, Petrolgate, the Granny Tax and Bradford West, I can now reveal that the leaders of Blue Labour, Purple Labour, Red Labour, Green Labour, "In The Black" Labour and "White Flag" Labour have agreed to bury the hatchet and combine forces to fight the ConDem government on a unified basis.

"Beige Labour", as the new grouping will be called, combines the best of all six strands of Labour thinking for a truly progressive alternative.

Well-known Telegraph blogger and Labour party commentator Dan Hodges welcomed the move, telling us:

What we have here is an end to the bitter factionalism which has marred Ed Miliband's first eighteen months. I've been as guilty as anyone of putting the boot into Ed - you could almost say I've been earning a living from it - but when we got the leaders of the various factions of Labour into the same room, it was clear that beating this wretched Tory-Liberal coalition was the priority. And to do that, everyone has to pour their best ideas into the mix.

Dan was generously forthcoming about the fascinating process behind choosing the name "Beige Labour" for the party's new combined popular front.

We wanted Labour to be seen as relevant to the kind of hard-working people who go shopping on a Saturday afternoon, so Ed Balls suggested why don't we all get the tube down to Homebase at Ealing (Ed knew that particular store because Neil Kinnock used to live down the road from it), choose a tin of paint for each Labour colour, get the work experience guy on the 'paint station' to mix them all together into one big tin and see what comes out? Lord Glasman was particularly enthusiastic about a nice shade of cobalt blue he'd found from Farrow and Ball, as I recall.

When we did that we needed a pretty big paint tin because we had six separate colours going into the mix. And I think Eoin Clarke from Red Labour got some paint splashed on his deck shoes, but he was pretty relaxed about that.

So what was the result of this meeting of minds and colours in a West London DIY store? Dan suddenly looked enthused as he described the outcome:

What we had, in the end, was beige, which I have to say was pretty much optimal. If you'd set out to choose a colour off-the-shelf you couldn't have done better than light brown. It's an everyman colour - a working class but aspirational living room colour. What we have here is Dulux Paint Labour - it won't appeal to your average university lecturer, but the suburbs in the south east will lap it up. I think this is the day Labour painted over its differences once and for all. It means I'm going to have to find something different to write about in my columns from now on, but so what? It's worth it if it means we win the next election.

The ICI Corporation, which produces Dulux paints, was reported to be in conversation with Labour Party HQ at Victoria Street last night about a "sizeable donation to party funds", possibly in exchange for launching a range of new brushes inspired by Ed Miliband's "tough but functional" haircut.

The Gamesters of Triskelion

Having been off the airwaves for what seems like an age, a warm welcome back to those readers who have had nothing on the page to read that haven't fled for more fertile pastures. Regrettably the significantly smaller and more rapid-fire interaction available on Twitter has taken up much of my limited spare time whilst some of the rest has been taken on some winter vacations down to parts of the American South West. If 'A week is a long time in politics' is something of a trite expression, then four months seems like an eternity. Indeed last week revealed one of the most inept budgets I can recall in recent times, certainly since the heyday of the 'Iron Fist' or 'Man who saved the World' (sadly not a bastardised David Bowie reference but this man)

The title post refers, as always to a Star Trek episode, which I thought was going to be something of a tricky fit (I'm waiting for a John Redwood related story to try and fit in 'Spock's Brain') when coming up with the concept of posts encompassing all 79 episodes of the series, but the budget appears to me to show a worrying lack of political sense and direction. As Telegraph (!) blogger Iain Martin put it:

'At least Gordon Brown's budgets used to take a day or so to unravel'

This budget basically was two fingers to almost every sector of society, beyond the primarily London-based Super-rich. When even notorious Blairite blogger Dan Hodges wades in to the morass to condemn it and, to my great surprise even praise Ed Miliband, (whose Budget riposte, although perhaps not as much of a tour de force as certain Sino/North Korean collaborators in the Guardian would have liked certainly saw him have much the better of the exchanges.) You've got to know you've badly misjudged the public mood.

Indeed the reaction of the many UKIP and Ultra - Libertarian bloggers on Twitter has been one of almost total disbelief. As one, the irascible @Jim_Watford put it:

'I never thought he (Cameron) could lose to Ed Miliband but that's what's going to happen'

'Fuel Duty being raised again. does anyone in this government have a clue?'

So why does the Budget attract, in my opinion such justified opprobrium? For me, three measures stood out as politically naive or plain idiotic:

1/ Failure to scrap plans to increase the Fuel Duty by 3p a litre. Whilst the Green opposition has actually been relatively neutral on this, it had the effect of seriously annoying The Sun and by extension it's 3 million plus readers, many of whom are converted Conservative voters the party needs to win if it is to have any chance of retaining power after 2014 (although I have to say a 2015 election is looking likely if the current polling trends continue) I can recall (and more on the 'Second Petrol crisis' to follow, time permitting) the 2000 'Fuel protests' which took place when Petrol was hovering around the £1.00 per litre mark. Diesel is already hitting over £1.50 without the tax rises, and for most dwellers outside London, Public transport for grocery shopping simply is not an option. Indeed, Osborne needs to be looking to cut further into the Labour client state with a view to reducing Fuel Duty rather than increasing it!

2/ As both 'Stalinist state' advocate Richard J Murphy quite eloquently and Ken Livingstone, in typically racist fashion, have pointed out, and I have also understood, the threat of people moving from London to Dubai, Singapore or Sitzerland is typically overplayed. Thus at a time when living standards are stagnating, it seems insane to cut the top rate of tax. And even assuming that, as stipulated this was a revenue maximiser, then why cut it only to 45p - The political lack of nous is truly breathtaking. I'd certainly not have advocated cutting the rate to 40p, but at least such a move would have been intellectually coherent.

3/ By 'Freezing' the age-related allowances for pensioners Osborne appears to have reintroduced the famous 'Stealth tax' narrative into British Politics. As the CPS pointed out, even by 2004, Labour had, through this method, introduced 75 Stealth taxes. I, for one, didn't elect a Tory government just to see them do exactly the same as the 'Clunking fist'. Furthermore, the elderly comprise the overwhelming majority of Tory activists and much of their vote. As I have pointed out before, the kind of people who are manning the barricades at 'Right to work' protests, 'Occupying' Private property, or 'Marching for Alternatives' aren't going to vote Conservative no matter how much you try and appease them. Why, thus, put in a measure likely to alienate your base, especially at a time when due to the massive fiscal profligacy of the previous administration, elderly savers have been the victims of an almost ZIRP (Zero Interest rate policy) for nearly two years of this government, and 2 of the previous?

In short, the Budget was almost enough to push me, in Millenarian style, into the Miliband camp, if only to see if following five years of Hard Leftism, something reasonable might arise from the ashes. It seems I'm not alone, and recent polls now put a ten point gap between Miliband and the Tories. The by-election result alluded to in my colleagues earlier post seems, superficially to have been a respite for Cameron, only if we ignore that whilst the Labour vote was badly hit, the Tory vote collapsed to under 3000, losing their candidate her deposit. Thus the Tories face the very real prospect of being the next 'Heath government' with Miliband cast in the role of Harold Wilson - the parallels with the 1970s look more and more apt with each passing day!

Galloway

Some brief thoughts on George Galloway's surprise win in the Bradford West by-election.

Firstly I should put it on the record that I was in the past - naively - a strong supporter of Galloway. In the run-up to the 2005 election it initially seemed to me that Respect was a genuine attempt to build a left alternative to New Labour, initially involving Greens as well as Reds, and Galloway's main point - that Tony Blair was a Bush poodle who should be in the dock with his mentor George W Bush for war crimes - made perfect sense to me.

My stance on Galloway has since changed and I'm now not a supporter of his at all, for two main reasons:

• the unsavoury alliance between elements of the far left and reactionary religious extremists which Respect cultivates;
• Galloway's next-to-useless record as Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005-10 parliament, where he turned up to only 7% of parliamentary votes while pursuing a full-time outside media career - including an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, FFS.

Also it seems to me that other political groupings - the Green Party, Labour Left, Liberal Left, Compass and Occupy LSX - articulate a left political perspective more successfully, and stand more chance of widespread success, than does Respect.

That said, it is quite something for Galloway to win Bradford West despite being written off by the media and the Labour Party in the seat. What it shows, I think, is the fragility of the orthodox pro-cuts, pro-austerity consensus which the ConDems - and the right wing of the Labour Party - are spoonfeeding the public. There are a great many more people in this country who know bullshit when they see it than the Westminster bubble might believe, and that bodes ill for the centre-right's continuing attempts to convince the British public that the economic sado-masochism we have embarked on is (a) necessary, and (b) desirable.

Of course, the danger is that disenchantment with the current consensus can feed the hard right as well as the hard left. Galloway expertly combines elements of both, but in future by-elections I'd expect to find one or more of UKIP, the BNP, the Greens and Respect all making inroads. Less chance of that happening at a general election because the system is stitched up against these smaller parties - but even so, I would not rule out more Caroline Lucas style breakthroughs from the parties that are "fringe" at the moment but, as the economic situation deteriorates further, are likely to become the New Mainstream.

Some good comedy for you on Budget Day

This is probably going to be the grimmest of grim days for anyone who doesn't want the UK to degenerate into a winner-take-all corporate fascist state, so allow me to lighten the load with a brilliant political comedy sketch courtesy of Robert Philpott, who has accused Michael Meacher of starting "factional warfare" in the Labour Party in a recent New Statesman article.

Coming from the leader of an organisation whose raison d'etre is factional warfare - with the objective of replacing any semblance of genuine socialism or social democracy in the Labour party with a compliant Tory-lite leadership who won't rock the boat and will agree with everything George Osborne says - this is nothing short of breathtaking, laughable hypocrisy.

And congratulations to Michael Meacher for telling it like it is a few days beforehand, in the same publication.

The main "religiously oppressed" people in the UK are kids who happen to be the wrong religion for their local school

In the months since the May 2010 election and the formation of the ConDem government, it has often seemed like every day is "silly season" in the media. There are a number of Tories - both ministers and backbenchers - who specialise in trotting out loony right-wing theories taken directly from the US Christian right, eugenicists, far-right libertarians and other unsavoury sources. One of the worst offenders is Lady Warsi, who yesterday said that "militant secularisation" was taking hold of society.

On the face of it, this is a statement so ludicrous that it is hard to take seriously. Warsi's argument appears to be based on two recent court rulings:

1. Bideford Council, which was told it can't hold prayers as a formal part of council meetings (councillors are of course free to hold prayers before the meetings start should they so wish);
2. the Christian B&B owners who weren't allowed to turn away a gay couple.

It's hard to see either of these judgements as evidence for secularisation, militant or otherwise. In the Bideford Council case, it is very hard to see what prayers have to do with council business. In the case of the Christian B&B owners, if the judgement had gone the other way it would have been tantamount to a ruling that anti-gay Christians should be exempt from laws outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. If that were allowed to stand, one might as well say that Nick Griffin should be exempt from laws outlawing discrimination on the grounds of race. But this has nothing to do with religion versus secularism. It's to do with whether the law should be applied consistently or not. Lady Warsi appears to be suggesting that anti-discrimination legislation amounts to "militant secularisation"; the corollary of this argument is that we can only have "religious freedom" if we allow the oppression of gay people, ethnic minorities, women, or other groups. In which case... give me militant secularisation over religious freedom every day.

There is one area in which an element of our society is discriminated against on a regular basis: school choice. But, as Dr Evan Harris (the greatest Lib Dem leader we never had) pointed out on Channel 4 News last night, it is children from non-religious families (and the "wrong" religions) who are discriminated against, not children from the "correct" religious families. A faith school - for example, a C of E school - can refuse an application from a child whose parents are of a different faith, or no faith, solely based on that reason. This is blatant religious discrimination of a type outlawed in most other areas of public services and the private market. For example, a supermarket can't refuse to serve you on the grounds you're an atheist. An employer can't refuse to employ you on the grounds you're from the wrong religion (except, I think, in the case of teachers at faith schools - once again, blatant discrimination). If I have a criticism to make of the National Secular Society, it's that they are picking the wrong targets. Prayers at council meetings is a niche issue at best. Discrimination in the school sector affects millions of children, and could probably be stopped via a test case if a school was taken to court (and if necessary to the European Court of Human Rights). Having said that, disclaimer: my legal knowledge is pretty much zero so I could be talking complete rubbish here.

As things stand, the Mickey Gove education reforms are going to hand over huge chunks of the school system to religious organisations, making an already big problem worse. If I have kids in the next few years, home schooling - or one of the "progressive" schools like Steiner - may be the only viable option. At this point I'd say "God help us" but that would just be playing into Lady Warsi's hands.

Greece: taking the long and painful road towards default

It's often been said that socialism is the long and painful route to capitalism and in the case of Soviet-style state capitalism that is probably right (although equally one could say that capitalism is the long and painful route to environmental catastrophe, followed quite possibly by socialism - if anyone is still alive long enough to enjoy such a state of affairs). But the economic torture which the EU and the IMF is putting Greece through in the name of "fiscal responsibility" is the long and painful route to bankruptcy and default. There is not a hope in hell of the savage austerity measures insisted on by the "troika" - including minimum wage and pension cuts - delivering budget balance; instead, they will deliver an ever-shrinking economy and a need for yet more savage cuts a year or so down the line.
The sheer insanity of the economic policies being followed in Greece at the moment is painfully obvious. This story ends in one of three ways:

1. fiscal union in the Eurozone. If the EU had a central budget and fiscal transfers between higher-income and lower-income states (like the US) for example, the Greek debt would be a relatively minor issue. The EU would be able to issue "Eurobonds" at relatively low rates of interest to fund the Greek deficit. This is unlikely to happen because Germany doesn't want Eurobonds. It wants a "fiscal compact" to bind member states into austerity but this is not at all the same thing as fiscal union; rather, it's a measure to outlaw "structural deficits" which, if anything, will exacerbate economic depressions by making Keynesian counter-cyclical spending harder.
2. Greece as a technocratic colony. This is the option that Germany and the IMF want - bypassing the Greek electoral system and putting "yes men" in place who will enact austerity measures for "as long as it takes" - perhaps in perpetuity - in a (probably futile) attempt to meet fiscal targets through spending cuts and tax rises.
3. Greece in default. I think this is the most likely option now. It's no longer a question of if Greece defaults, but rather, when it does.

I would be very surprised if plans were not afoot behind the scenes for a Greek default and the return of the drachma. (The return of the drachma is not inevitable - it is possible that Greece could default and stay in the Euro - although that raises a host of issues, for example regarding contagion, and how to stop the same thing happening again to Greece a few years down the line). But being kicked out of the Euro is more likely than defaulting in it.

It is important to make clear that although default is the best available option for Greece it is by no means an easy option. The drachma will collapse in value in the short run and Greece is likely to experience high inflation as the cost of imported goods rise. Much of the debt held by Greek consumers and businesses (as opposed to government debt) will be Euro-denominated and so its value relative to Greek GDP will increase greatly in the event of the drachma reappearing. This will most likely lead to a wave of secondary defaults in the business and household sectors.

However, readopting its own currency would give Greece the necessary flexibility to work its way back to economic health. Tourism would boom hugely as Greece would suddenly become a very attractive cheap holiday destination. The reduction in the wage and price level relative to the Euro would make Greece a much more attractive location for foreign direct investment by foreign-owned businesses. Greek exports would be much more competitive than before... and so on.

So, for me, given that a US-style European fiscal union is off the table, default followed by economic rebuilding from a vastly lower exchange rate looks like the best option for Greece.

But what does Loukanikos, the world-famous riot dog, say?