The Afghanistan war logs

I can't get on to the Wikileaks site at the moment to look at the Afghanistan stuff - and I expect that to continue for some time yet - but Channel 4 news had a good summary.

The material confirms what most of us sane people out on the blogosphere have been saying all along... Afghanistan is a disaster, with thousands of civilian casualties (at least).

It's unlikely I'll have time to analyse the thousands of pages of material in depth any time soon, but hopefully there'll be plenty of other people doing that.

This just underlines the spectacular military misadventure that was the Bush administration. And if Obama and Cameron have any sense they will get the hell out of Afghanistan. And fast, before who knows how many thousands more lives are lost.

Some thoughts on the Labour leadership election

I should be getting into a zone where I'm able to do a bit more blogging over the next few weeks after a very quiet July, so it's time to take another look at the Labour leadership election. FWIW here is my .02 Euro (can't get the Euro key to work under Linux - what the hell?) on each candidate:

• Andy Burnham: the blog post which said "there is a token candidate for the leadership - his name is Andy Burnham" says it all. A nice guy, but hopeless.
  
• Diane Abbot: not as bad as many people have been saying, and will probably pick up more votes than most pundits realise. She's unlikely to win, though.
  
• Ed Balls: good, hard-hitting soundbites attacking the coalition's economic policy fatally underlined by a neanderthal stance on immigration, as previously taken apart on this blog. Also not the most popular flavour in the jelly bean pack with voters... in fact probably the hardest sell of all 5 candidates. (Diane has a lot of voter recognition through being on the TV a lot, and who the hell could dislike Andy Burnham? He's the Ronnie Corbett of Labour politics. But if you remember Ronnie in Sorry! that's what Burnham would be like as leader... a bit of a laugh.
  
• Dave Miliband: now we start coming to the real contenders. He has been steadily trying to move away from his 'microBlair' days with a spirited pitch to the soft left on some issues, interspersed with splashes of the old Blairite rhetoric. In short, a little something for every voter in this leadership contest - and therefore maybe tickling all the bases and not nailing any of them. His campaign team is good and features some real radicals, the delivery is smooth and assured, but I still can't quite convince myself that Dave really means it. I just sense the dead hand of Tony Blair lurking round the corner. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I'm sorry Dave, I couldn't vote for you even if I was eligible (and unless I join the Labour Party I'm not - more on that later). Also, what is the government's enquiry into torture going to come up with? As Foreign Secretary at the time, did Dave knowingly go along with extraordinary rendition? If he knew the British state was complicit in torture there's no way he should be anywhere near the Labour leadership. Or indeed anywhere at all, apart from a prison cell.
  
• Ed Miliband: for me, the obvious choice. A smooth soft left pitch with maybe a dash of something harder in the mix. Can be smooth, like Dave, or more of a rottweiler, like Balls, depending on what's required ("the emissary from planet f***", he was nicknamed by members of the Blair entourage when he was a Brown special adviser). Also has enough cabinet experience to avoid looking like a novice but is a recent enough entry into Parliament to still seem pretty fresh (and wasn't in Parliament during Iraq, which helps A LOT.) If I do end up joining Labour my vote will be for Ed.
  

The interesting thing about this election is that no-one has a bloody clue what's going to happen really. Will Straw has a good go at predicting the result on Left Foot Forward, with the ambitious "LFF model" suggesting that the Milibands are neck-and-neck on first preferences, with Ed likely to draw ahead on second preferences. This is sketchy analysis to be sure - there's no proper polling of the people who are actually going to be voting (the YouGov poll of the electorate and a ComRes poll of business leaders, both of which favoured Dave, mean f*** all because almost none of those polled - perhaps literally none at all! - are eligible voters in the election.) But it's the only analysis of any quality at all we've got so far, and I think it's about right. Dave may come out slightly ahead - maybe by 5 percent or so - on first prefs but I think that second prefs will favour Ed and put him over the top - maybe not by much.

And that in my view, is A Very Good Thing. Perhaps we should be nervous though that Simon Heffer, of all people, is suggesting that Ed could be prime minister within a year. Now one school of thought is that support is a good thing wherever it comes from. But when it's the Heff, that seems crazy. I haven't read the article in any detail yet.. it was linked from LFF. I'll read it in a minute.

So anyway, carry on Ed. You can do it. Just don't f***ing let us down if you do win. I'm already minded to join the Greens... not because of anything Ed or the other candidates have done, but because there's no way Caroline Lucas is gonna sell anyone out. And in these days of duplicity, double dealing and splintered manifesto commitments, I find that reassuring.

Catholic Church thinks women priests are tantamount to child abuse

...but of course until recently it was much more willing to tolerate one than the other.

Really this tells you all you need to know about the world's most reactionary and corrupt religious organisation.

Some people are fighting the good fight for sanity and liberal tolerance within the RC Church and I wish them all the best. They've got a real fight on their hands though, the poor bastards.

Jon Gaunt is the tip of a very large and septic iceberg

So the extreme right-wing shock-jock Jon Gaunt has lost his fight against Ofcom's decision to uphold complaints against him (although he will appeal).

In 2008, when discussing Redbridge Council's decision to ban smokers from fostering children, Gaunt called Redridge councillor Michael Stark a "Nazi" and an "ignorant pig".

Perhaps strangely, this kind of thing doesn't faze me as I wouldn't expect Gaunt, or Richard Littlejohn, or any of the other stupid little fascist wankers who've ever tried to create their own version of Fox News on the British airwaves to behave any differently.

Banning Gaunt probably isn't the best response though (not that Ofcom have actually suggested doing that - he's been fired by TalkSport but remains available for hire by anyone else mad enough to take him on). Instead, EVERY person who gets interviewed by Gaunt should just say "how's it going today you Nazi? Alright, you ignorant pig?" etc. until listeners switch off from the flood of incoherent abuse. It's always been a one-way flood of abuse from Gaunt - my proposal is that we make it a two-way flood of abuse and see how he likes that.

Ofcom, in their justification for censuring Gaunt, rightly point out that "the offensive and abusive nature of the broadcast was gratuitous, having no factual content and justification".

Very true. But for consistency's sake they should also point out that the Daily Mail, the Express (complete with appalling headlines referring to "ethnics", the Sun, most reality TV programmes, the Dutch football team, and Prime Ministers' Questions, not to mention at least half the current cabinet, are also gratuitous, with no factual content or justification. It's a big septic tank out there once you dig a little.

Back in contact

Well we had a good holiday last week but it's nice to be back. Or it would be, if there wasn't SO MUCH work to do. Still, I will make some time to watch the World Cup final tonight. I will be backing the Netherlands (or "Holland" as they are erroneously called on ITV - that's a bit like referring to England as "East Anglia", for example) for the sole reason that they have a good shirt number font. It's not exactly the same as the font used in the movie "Rollerball" (that was more like cheque book numbers), but it does conjure up that 70s spirit. Also they play in orange, which was the colour that Houston (James Caan's team) wore in "Rollerball", so there is a nice connection there as well.

So much stuff on the government during the week I was away that it's hard to know where to begin. I'll try to do some more detailed posts on just how awful this administration is later this week. But it was nice to see Micky Gove taking some real flak over letting schools fall down rather than refurbish them. Once Labour gets a new leader they will probably be running at something over 50% in the opinion polls. And, under just about any electoral system, that translates to a wipeout for the coalition next time round. So Bring It On.

Should football be more like boxing?

This will probably be the last posting on football for some time... I don't run a sports blog very well, as I simply don't know enough. But I wanted to draw attention to an interesting article by Simon Kuper in the Guardian, "Fifa corrupt? is the Pope a Catholic?"

Extraordinary allegations of vote-rigging for the election of FIFA president Sepp Blatter (he who is opposed to 4th official video replays in games), match-fixing and intimidation by FIFA of anyone who dares to speak out against corruption.

I should stress that I have absolutely no idea whether any of this stuff is true. But even if halfway true, it seems to me that the best course of action for any countries who think the current system stinks would be to form a breakaway international football association and hold their own rebel world cup.

FIFA is like any unaccountable monopolist: that power corrupts, and in the absence of any democratic mechanism to hold them to account, a bit of competition would work wonders.

I've always liked the fact that boxing has about 3 or 4 separate world titles as it makes things somewhat more messy and unpredictable - which is the essence of generating any interest in sport, really. Maybe football will end up going the same way. It would be much more exciting than what's going on at the moment, anyhow.

Willie's still got it

I just wanted to say a couple of positive words about Willie Nelson, the subject of a very early Giroscope post back in 2006, back in the days when the much-missed Barney Ruddle was still writing for us.

Willie played Glastonbury this year - just seen the footage and it was f***ing EXCELLENT. It was basically a small club set in a stadium venue - rough and ready, superb vibe. I recommend that y'all catch this one while it's still on iPlayer.

F***ing lame!

The end of an extraordinary week which has seen two events of staggering lameness - the Coalition's neo-Thatcherite, slasher horrorshow budget (which may well be the harbinger of the death of the Liberal Democrats given the evidence in The Observer on the number of supporters deserting them) and England soccer team stepping into the abyss with a performance of staggering ineptitude, losing 4-1 to Germany.

The cries of "we wuz robbed" have predictably arisen after a clear England goal by Frank Lampard (which would have taken them to level pegging on 2-2) was disallowed by the assistant referee, who said it didn't cross the line when it certainly did. However this just seems like an excuse to avoid focusing on the fact that England were utter cack. Is there anyone out there who seriously believes England should have won this game? Get a lobotomy. They were good for about 10 minutes and utter shite for 80.

Fabio Capello won't resign... well, would a change of manager really make any difference? Four weeks ago everyone seemed to think this guy was a genius. Is it his fault that players of the calibre of Lampard, Gerrard and Rooney can't pass the ball or put together any kind of fluid attacking play? I'm not sure. The media have a lot less of a clue even than the England management, in my book.

The one thing I couldn't understand was the presence of David Beckham. A "bridge" between the manager and the players? Why was one needed? Perhaps he was only there for the beer.

A more interesting question is whether there should be video replay technology involved in games to stop crappy refereeing decisions affecting the outcome. I'm not sure. FIFA says it would slow the pace of the game down. But rugby union uses it and it takes a few seconds, at most. So it seems a pretty weak reason not to have it.

It's not really something that's unfair on a macro level, though (as opposed to in an individual incident), as both teams have to put up with the absence of video replay, so essentially it's just another random factor. And in this case it would be hard to argue it determined the result - just made it 4-1 rather than 4-2 IMHO.

F*** it all anyway. I'm a casual fan of football at best - enjoying the Glastonbury footage a lot more at the moment. Dizzee Rascal with Guthrie Govan - now that's rock'n'roll.

England and the curse of dimensionality

The mention this morning on BBC 6Music that Val Kilmer is to set up a B&B (?!?) reminded me of a review of Batman Forever where the comment was made, "the problem with Kilmer's Batman is that the role requires two-dimensional acting from an actor who is barely capable of one."

And that seemed to me a fine metaphor for England-Slovenia today. I have not been to Slovenia but by the accounts of friends and family who have done, it is a fantastic place, and I wish them all the best in today's game. To win, England will require at least a two-dimensional approach; but against Algeria they were at best one-dimensional, and perhaps still lower.

One of the advantages of being self-employed is that you can bunk off to watch football anytime you feel like it. I rarely do, but today will be an exception.

Will England bounce back, as in 1990? Or will they fall apart with the incredible lameness of France?

"Fascinating".

initial thoughts on the Budget

I will write a longer piece as and when I get time, but in brief: a real slasher horrorshow of a Budget, delivered in the most snotty tone imaginable. I listened on the radio this time - couldn't bear to watch.

The good thing about it is that, assuming the next Labour leader can walk and chew gum at the same time, he/she has the next election sewn up. Because these measures are gonna be just unbelievably unpopular.

But anyway, more later.

Krugman nails lies, idiocy and malice aplenty

As Matt of BHaPPY put it to me last week:

"Why is it that I only understand economics when I read this bloke?"

Simple - because Krugman (and several other honourable mentions like Joe Stiglitz and Martin Wolf) are talking sense on Keynesian fiscal stimulus, whereas most politicians - particularly in Europe - don't have a fucking clue.

We have somehow gone from a situation where fiscal stimulus was patently inadequate in Europe, but at least it was being done a bit, to a new and dangerous phase when governments are intent on creating a new Great Depression by cutting spending when the economy is least able to cope with a fall in demand.

Led of course by a couple of twerps called Dave and George. To be honest Gilbert and George would be a better bet for a PM/Chancellor duo. At least they're not malicious.

My advice to politicians if we want to get out of this one alive is to keep reading Paul's blog, combine two parts Paul with one part Richard Murphy three times daily follow advice three times daily and swallow hard.

Why is it I only understand rock guitar when I hear this bloke?

...and another classic

England-Algeria: hilariously bad. Kids, I haven't laughed this much since Ray Wilkins threw the ball at the ref in Mexico 1986. Marina Hyde in the Guardian sums it up well: "almost comically unwatchable".

No "almost" about it in fact, folks: this was pants-wettingly lame.

Topped off by a hilarious outburst from Wayne Rooney - the Phil Collins of English football (to be fair, probably extremely frustrated at not being 100% match-fit): "it's nice to see your own fans booing you". Well sorry mate but what do you expect based on that performance. I guess the fans would love to lie and say it was great, but it was in fact piss poor.

Based on this evidence, if we encounter even mildly good opposition, let alone class teams like Argentina or Mexico, we are toast.

But we may well not even get far enough to find out. On this form, Slovenia will probably beat us. And that would add up to the lamest first round effort for England since the infamous Euro 1992 tournament: with Capello becoming the new "turnip" hate figure. We hope something will turn up but what we get is turnip... actually I think Graham Taylor was underrated, the poor bastard.

Although I am too young to remember it first hand, the public and media reaction to performances like this seems to recall the super-lame Don Revie era of the mid-seventies. While Kevin Keegan is often held up as the archetypal England manager I would make the case for Revie: great on paper, a bust on the pitch, an enigma to media and players alike, and finally pissing off for a big cheque at the United Arab Emirates.

If England lose the final group game I expect a delegation from UAE to be landing at Heathrow to meet Mr Capello with a Very Big Cheque forthwith.

I will miss Fabio's facial expressions though. Top class. If it was decided on facial expressions we would already have won the tournament.

Actually there's method in England's madness this time out. If you can't win, at least lose badly. That's a lot more exciting for fans and pundits alike. No-one really remembers World Cups 2002 or 2006, when we were OK but not brilliant; but people do remember the farce of Euro 2000, when we was bloody awful. Something To Put The Boot Into. That's what football in this country is about. I don't really like it, but it does make me laugh.

A perfect start to England's World Cup

Apologies for radio silence over the last week. At the weekend I went to my best friend's stag do in Norwich, which I'd organised, via Thetford where we ran around with lasers against a bunch of 14-year olds. For someone of my age, being "killed" by a kid who looks like Lookyboop is slightly embarrassing. But never mind.

Since then I've been up against so many deadlines at work that I probably shouldn't be taking the necessary 5 minutes out to write this email. But it's nice to have a break.

I loved the England-USA game in the World Cup. It was the classic England start... an OK performance marred by dodgy goalkeeping (a perennial bugbear for us over the years) and bizarre managerial facial expressions (again, something of a standard for us.) Sadly as it was just a group match there was no penalty shoot-out, otherwise I bet we'd have lost out with a real howler.

The same things seem to recur every time in the World Cup, regardless of players or managers. England and Spain always underperform, Germany always overperform. Amusing but a bit dull really.

My prediction? We'll draw or maybe scrape a win in our second match before thrashing the opposition in our final group game and going through to a second round match with Germany, which we'll lose on penalties. A German bistro in somewhere like Coventry will be vandalised by English morons. And so it goes.

What's wrong with getting a time machine and assassinating Margaret Thatcher?

John McDonnell is having to eat humble pie over a remark that he made at a Labour leadership hustings - that he wanted to go back in time to the 1980s to "assassinate Thatcher". Why is this controversial? It seems obviously the right thing to do, if one could.

It's not always the most effective technique - we could have ended up with Norman Tebbit in charge instead. But if a more moderate Tory - Heath or Whitelaw, for example, had been in charge rather than a rabid right-wing lunatic, many, many lives could have been saved.

It's a less extreme version of the dilemma faced by Christopher Walken's character in "The Dead Zone" (a classic which I implore you to watch if you haven't already). If you know that someone is going to precipitate global armageddon if they come to power, and you have the chance to take them out before they do so, is that wrong? It's a hypothetical situation to be sure.

But then so's getting a time machine and assassinating Thatcher. And to be fair, Thatcher didn't start World War III (Galtieri wasn't a big enough player).

She did a f*** of a lot of damage though. Jesus Christ.

New Balls, please? No thanks

Michael Heseltine is not, and never will be, one of my favourite politicians, despite his legendary status in some quarters. Like Kenneth Clarke, he is a dodgy misanthrope sheltering behind a warm and cuddly public image. (Although to be fair, Clarke at least enjoys jazz, which counts for something).

However, Heseltine did produce a classic quote in the mid-1990s with his attack on the mention of "post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory" in a Gordon Brown speech. The line had been provided by Ed Balls, and Heseltine produced the classic putdown: "it wasn't Brown, it was Balls". Great days.

Ed has since gone on to produce a lot of Balls in his own right, but reached new heights of cheap right-wing punkishness with an extremely unpleasant Observer article where he says that:

Within the EU, free movement of goods and services works to our advantage. But free movement of labour is another matter entirely.

Why's that, Ed? Apparently because:

There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years. But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent. The result was, as many of us found in the election, our arguments on immigration were not good enough. We faced rising anti-European sentiment with small parties claiming they could seal the borders.

Really, Ed? Has there been a massive negative impact on wages, terms and conditions of people? If so, how come every single empirical study of the impact of migration from the EU on UK wages and/or employment has found almost no impact - and in some cases positive impacts? I know this research extremely well - I've done some of it, in fact - and I also know that Ed Balls is talking out of his arsehole on this issue. Ok, the local level (Super Output Area) data is poor and there may have been adverse effects in a few areas. But if it was that widespread it would show up at regional or local authority level, or at local authorities - and it simply doesn't.

For sure there are some people experiencing poor working conditions - but that's nowt to do with migration. That's due to failure to regulate the labour market properly - for example failure to implement the EU agency workers directive (which Ed does mention to be fair.)

Migration has also caused pressure on public services in certain areas - but that's because the funding formulas are based on population size and demographics in previous years and don't respond quickly enough to population shifts. Again, Balls is shooting at the wrong target.

But I'd wager that his intention here isn't to present a balanced evidence base anyway. Instead, he's trying to exploit the meme that's emerged since the election that Labour lost because it wasn't tough on immigration (and welfare claimants). And trying to turn Labour into a reactionary Sun readers football-hooligan parody of what a left-wing party should be. It's not dropping all the way into the cesspit of the British National Party to be sure. But it is dipping a foot into that stinking morass of hatred and xenophobia.

In any case, free movement of labour is a cornerstone of the EU. Some countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Romania) are subject to temporary labour movement restrictions to be sure (in my view, unfairly - if a country's ready to enter then it should be a full member from day one). But the restrictions are meant to be just that - temporary. I'd have more respect for Balls if he was trying to go for a left-wing version of UKIP - suggesting leaving the EU. I wouldn't agree with him but at least it would be consistent But of course he doesn't have the balls to do that - he'd rather play to the galley in the most disgusting way possible.

Balls - and Andy Burnham, who has said very similar things - can go f*** themselves as far as I'm concerned. We have to hope and pray (even as atheists) that Eddy Miliband wins this leadership campaign. If not, I'm off to the Greens and fuck the Labour party. It can kiss my ass. This kind of reactionary shit from Balls is what no-one needs right now and particuarly the deprived communities whom he professes to be on the side of.

Mini heatwave

Apologies for relative radio silence over the past few days... I've been frantically programming PHP (not for this site unfortunately, but another project I'm working on) and now I'm hit by the hilariously-named "mini-heatwave". (Incidentally I love the way the Telegraph insists on saying 86F (30C) instead of 30C (86F) in its header. Get with the program kids - Celsius has been the main UK measure since about - er... 1975 or so? Only that last bulwark of British imperialism, the USA, takes Farenheit seriously there days.

I like Kelvin myself - temperature inflation, and you don't have to worry about that goddamned degree sign going missing. Gonna be well over 300 today, kids.

This mini-heatwave crap is preposterous - it's like 2 hot days in a row or something. I can just about remember 1976 (and the Farenheit scale)... that was a heatwave. 2003 - when it was 35 degrees at the car boot sale and vinyl was melting before you could get it home - that was a heatwave. This is just a couple of days of having to make sure you get down the allotment to water it. No big deal.

I'm always particularly impressed by the ice cream van that goes up and down our road on hot days like this. The guy's little music jingle system is so badly tuned that he has moved into microtones... he's like an ice-cream version of Ligeti. Or something.

I am the Laws

And so David Laws wins the prize for shortest ministerial career to date (although he'll probably be back at some point if this coalition holds up.

While the manner of his departure - feeling unable to come out because of possible prejudice - is unfortunate, the media reaction - that the Coalition has been deprived of some sort of star performer - is ludicrous. Laws's main attributes seemed to be a hard-right approach to economic policy and a wish to cut public expenditure as much as possible. What's so great about that? He was the Judge Dredd of the coalition administration. A Tory by any other name.

Similarly, fears that Laws's replacement, Danny Alexander, will be somehow not up to the job, are equally laughable. In one of my previous jobs I spent some time talking to Danny Alexander for a project I was doing on welfare policy and found him to be very on-the-ball. I have little idea what his general political stance is, but the idea that he's out of his depth is frankly ludicrous. I don't know how the newspapers get away with writing crap like that.

Moving so far to the right you won't recognise them

While yesterday's Queen speech (useful details of the 23 bills included here) contained some good stuff, notably on civil liberties (scrapping ID cards, reduction in surveillance and CCTV, more rights to protest) it was, particularly on economic policy and public services, largely a right-wing Tory effort.

The biggest example of this is the complete change in priorities for academy schools. Previously used as an attempt to boost performance of badly-performing schools in deprived areas, they are now going to be used as a kind of surrogate grammar school or GMS programme - the best performing schools will be allowed to opt out of LEA control and will get more resources to do so. Huge educational inequalities already exist in the state system, but one could at least argue that Labour's academy program was an attempt to bring the worst performers up to closer to the average (even if the mechanism for doing so was questionable). Whereas this is a recipe to exacerbate educational inequality and pave the way for the wholesale privatisation of the system a few years down the line.

Welfare reform is another area where the Coalition is moving to the extreme right. While the idea of conditionality in the benefit system (i.e. where you have to undertake job search as a condition of receiving benefit, if you are fit to seek work) is reasonable enough, the amounts of benefit currently being offered to unemployed people are so inadequate that there is no way the system can function properly to facilitate job search. Iain Duncan Smith's solution? Pay people even less and make the sanctions positively draconian. It seems likely this will just produce thousands of people dying on the streets, or a new criminal underclass. Which is of course the idea, as the coalition will then be able to implement harder sentences and be "tough on crime". It's like Tony Blair x 1000%.

So some real sicko bills here, giving the lie to the idea that this is some centrist coalition. That certainly doesn't mean that the left should oppose every single thing the coalition's doing. But it does mean that on several key policy issues the agenda seems to be a lot of Tory and not very much Lib Dem.

Jon is outstanding... but he ain't standing

So Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the Labour leadership.

This is a pity in many ways: I don't know if Jon could have won if he'd stood, or even if he would have been a good leader if he'd won. But for many years he's been offering the most coherent critique of New Labour from the soft left. That's the level of insight Labour needs if whoever wins this election is going to turn things around to be able to win next time round. And we haven't seen it yet from other candidates, potential or actual.

I'd hoped that Ed Miliband would get to that level of incisiveness at the Fabian conference last weekend; but he didn't really get there, which was a disappointment. David Miliband's campaign "re-launch" (what, one week in?) also falls a bit flat for me. And the thinness of the candidate field so far is a little worrying. With Jon out of the running, and no other obvious left candidate, we're not going to have the kind of excitement that the Clarke-Redwood ticket, for example, brought to the Tory campaign of 1997 (or was it 2001? I can't remember). This could be a deadly dull Labour leadership campaign - which would be a real shame. OK so we don't want a repeat of the 1981 Labour deputy leadership contest (and at least there's very little chance of a party split) but it would be great if someone in the contest could display a little passion. At this rate we'll end up drafting in Liam Fox to give the pretenders lessons...

Reflections on the Fabian conference: exploring the wrong reasons for losing

Spent an enjoyable (yes, really) day at the Fabian Society post-election conference at SOAS yesterday. It was billed as the Ed Miliband show, and Ed didn't disappoint, announcing his candidacy for Labour leader. It was a pretty good keynote speech - Ed is an old lag at the DaveCam "strolling round the stage without notes" shtick. He didn't blow the audience away, though. What was weird was that two points, in particular, were stressed as to why Labour lost - and this wasn't just in Ed's speech, but all over the place in the panel sessions:

1. "voters on the doorstep" were worried about immigration;

2. "voters on the doorstep" were worried about an "unfair" tax and benefit system and in particular, lack of conditionality in the benefit system (this wasn't how voters expressed it, obviously, but this is what they meant; people who were getting benefits without doing any work).

Fair enough, but both of those were huge issues in 2005 as well - and Labour still won, albeit narrowly. Personally, I don't buy these issues as the main reason why Labour went from 2% in the lead to a 7% deficit against the Tories in a five year period.

So what's my explanation? A different kind of deficit - the fiscal deficit - is part of it. Mainly because the economic crisis badly damaged Labour's reputation for economic competence - and deservedly so, because Brown, in particular, had spent 10 years telling people that he'd abolished boom and bust. If you rely on a story that turns out to be obvious bullshit, don't be surprised if people turn on you very quickly when you get found out. The next Labour leader should deliver a bottle of champagne to George Osborne, because if it hadn't been for the fact that he was seen as a complete twerp even by most of his own supporters, the Tories would have done a lot better IMHO.

The other, easier-to-fix problem (in fact an already fixed problem) which wasn't mentioned at the Fabian conference yesterday (out of respect to Gordon Brown) is that Brown was, quite simply, fucking awful in an election campaign. With a few honourable exceptions his campaigning style was tired, awkward and offputting. Contenders for the leadership and other commentators are cautioning against blaming the whole result on Brown and I quite agree; but on the other hand, it's important to acknowledge that he was a huge problem. Any of the potential Labour leaders - even Ed Balls - would be vastly more comfortable in the election campaign.

So overall, Ed did OK, and despite efforts by his brother MicroBlair to lay down some frontrunner credentials in the Observer today, it seems to me that the Ed bandwagon is running and will be hard to stop. But he's gonna have to be a lot more specific over the next few months about how to win the next election. Some preliminary suggestions:

• admitting that Labour got the economy wrong. The Tories were very good at this in their 1974-9 period of opposition; Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher basically junked their entire "post-war-consensus" approach to the economy (which they had supported in Ted Heath's cabinet) and argued that Labour was still stuck with the old model and only the Tories could run the economy effectively. It was largely bollocks - monetarism was a much bigger failure than anything Wilson or Callaghan attempted - but it played well with the voters. The key for Labour is to pigeonhole Coalition economic policies as stuck in the neoliberal orthodoxy that Blair and Brown signed up to. And then offering a more effective alternative to cuts, retrenchment and austerity, based on long-term investment and active industrial policy. (This skips over a lot of stuff that I'll be developing over the next few months).
• do not degenerate (further than has happened already) into the party that best articulates the concerns of Daily Mail readers. Labour is not going to win the next election by being tougher on benefit "scroungers" or immigration than the Coalition. Partly because the Coalition is going to be extremely tough on both of these (and damage millions of lives in the process). There will not be a lot of space to the right of Iain Duncan Smith on welfare for example, and for Labour to try to live there would be a huge error. Better to promote a benefit system based on a "flexicurity" model; high benefits combined with job search conditions. On immigration, one thing that no-one really acknowledged at the Fabian meeting was that we can't restrict the numbers of workers coming in from central and Eastern Europe (even if we wanted to do so) without, er, leaving the EU? Pushing the coalition towards an ever-more-Eurosceptic stance (and pointing out the absurdity of the Lib Dems for supporting this shit and junking their own, progressive, policies on immigration) is the best way forward. The more Labour can push the Coalition up a UKIP-inspired cul-de-sac the better.
• Take the reform ball and run hard with it. Political reform and civil liberties are two areas where the Coalition is probably going to be doing some very progressive things, and rather than clinging on to the most unpleasant aspects of the New Labour era, Labour post-2010 needs to challenge the coalition from the left rather than the right. The coalition is offering a referendum on AV? Great, we'll offer one on AV Plus if we get in. The coalition is scrapping ID cards? Great, we'll expand FOI measures. And so on. These areas provide an ideal opportunity to emphasis the differences between past and future Labour.

Anyway that's just some ideas for now. I enjoyed the conference; most of the general public wouldn't have.