The Lib Dems: from willing collaborators to neoliberal lemmings

My view on the Liberal Democrats is evolving with each party conference.

In 2010, I accused them of being spineless collaborators with the Tories.

In 2011, I amended that to saying they were willing collaborators with the Tories.

Now, I just think they've got a death wish and are incapable of independent thought.

How else do you explain the party's willingness to stick with the completely discredited Nick Clegg, thus virtually ensuring that their vote collapses to less than half of its 2010 level at the next election in 2015? On a uniform swing this would all but annihilate the Lib Dem parliamentary party. Of course the swing is unlikely to be uniform and some of the party's MPs may be able to survive on a strong local vote - particularly if they are seen as mavericks who opposed the general thrust of collaboration with the Tories. However, 2015 is likely to be a yellow bloodbath under Clegg however the local voting breaks down.

Many commentators had expected open revolt at this week's Lib Dem conference - and given the general quality of political commentary, that was almost a guarantee that such a revolt wouldn't happen. In the end the only people seriously agitating for a coup were: (a) people who've been critical of Clegg since 2010 - e.g. Lord Oakeshott and Lembit Opik, who can safely be locked in the box labelled "serial troublemakers"; and (b) the very worthy but in-the-wrong-party Liberal Left group (have a look at Labour Left and the Green Party guys, and then Make Your Choice.) A floor motion aiming to commit the Lib Dem leadership to a "Plan B" and an end to austerity failed abysmally when put to the vote. I'd argue that the weakness of the Lib Dem left is what statisticians call a "sample selection" effect - a large proportion of the left of the Lib Dem party walked out after  the decision to collaborate with the Tories, and what you're left with is the right-wingers. It's the same thing that's happened to the Lib Dems' share of the national vote.

In the end, Lib Dems must be hoping for a miracle - that somehow the economy will start growing quickly between now and 2015 and they will reap the rewards. I think this is highly unlikely - we may well escape "triple dip" recession, but growth will be sluggish at best. And the signs from the Eurozone crisis are that it is likely to get worse - perhaps much worse - before it gets better. Meanwhile, almost no-one left of centre in the British electorate (which is over half of the Lib Dems' former voters) will trust Nick Clegg with their vote again - ever. In short this is collective lemmingmania from the Lib Dem grassroots and MPs alike, for which they will surely pay a heavy price in 2015. And the main gainer will be Ed Miliband, who can't believe his luck; he's secured around a 10 point increase in vote share from 2010 to 2015 without having to do anything at all.

Clegg's contempt for everything his party used to campaign on was shocking in his speech yesterday. Opposition to tuition fees, for example, was dismissed as "protest politics". Now there are arguments for and against tuition fees, but just to dismiss the whole issue like that - coming from someone who relied on the policy to get elected! - is contemptible bollocks. And the old lies on taxation were wheeled out again - "we have taken x million people out of paying tax" whereas in fact the switch from income tax to VAT results in the poorest paying more, not less. It's straight-down-the-line lies like this, coming from someone who espoused the "new politics" in 2010, that have made many voters feel that, if this is "the new politics", give us back the old politics, please. At least Labour and the Tories never pretended to be anything other than cynical grab-yer-wallet bastards.

I've written about this shower for long enough now so this may well be the last post for them (in more ways than one) until the election campaign. Let 'em rot.

Nick Clegg - Labour secret agent?

(Note: this post is running a couple of weeks late because I was so busy that I only got it half-finished, but when I realised it was a month since we'd posted anything on the blog at all, I realised it had to go out, even as was. So "this week's announcement" actually means "the announcement a few weeks ago..." etc.

This week's announcement by Nick Clegg that the Lib Dems will vote against the boundary changes introduced by the Tories is further support for my view that Clegg has, in a strange way, done the country a huge service by uniting the left, and making Labour the natural party of government.

To explain this claim it's necessary to dig back into British electoral history. In the 1980s the great question in British politics was: how can the left vote be united in such a way as to stop permanent Tory government? The Labour/SDP split of 1981 led to a situation where the Tories were able to secure huge majorities with a little over 40% of the vote because the anti-Tory vote was badly split between Labour (on about 30%) and the SDP-Liberal Alliance (on about 25%).

At the time the Guardian was full of articles lamenting the problem of the split left (I know because I started reading the Guardian every day in 1987 and I used to read this stuff every day.) The Labour hope at the time was that the SDP/Liberal Alliance's electoral challenge would gradually fizzle out and we'd see a return to the 'normal' two-party politics of the post-war period. The Liberals and SDP tried their best to destroy themselves in 1988 with the formation of the Liberal Democrats, but the Lib Dems recovered to a vote share of 23% in the 1992 election - still large enough to ensure another split in the anti-Tory vote, and a 4th term for the Tories. 

Tony Blair took the different tack of moving Labour so far to the right that he hoovered up a good proportion of natural Tory voters, even though the Lib Dems still managed 18% in the 1997 election. But the split left remained a problem in the UK - masked by the Blairite centre-right thrusts in 1997 and 2001, but very obvious in 2005 where the collapse in the Labour vote to 35%, coupled with the Lib Dems increasing their share of the vote to 22% by Charles Kennedy's positioning of them to the left of Labour on many issues, meant that it was only a ludicrously unfair electoral system that gave Labour a working overall majority despite finishing only 2% ahead of the Tories. 

With the re-emergence of the Tories as an electoral force (of sorts) under Michael Howard and then David Cameron it seemed inevitable that the split in the UK's "progressive" electoral forces would help the Tories regain power - and this did indeed happen in 2010 (helped by the crapness of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and as election campaigner), but something weird was happening to the Liberal Democrats. Under Clegg's leadership since the end of 2007, they had begun to morph  - almost unnoticeably at first - into a second right-wing party. Although with a very different stance from the Tories on Europe, constitutional reform and some social issues (most notably support for marriage in the tax system), on most other issues - particularly economic policy and public service "reform" - there was very little to choose between the Lib Dems and the Tories by 2010. This made the Lib Dems potentially a more natural coalition partner with the Tories than with Labour for the first time in decades. The electoral arithmetic - which would have made a Labour-Lib Dem coalition very difficult - and the personal animosity between Clegg and Brown also helped drive the Lib Dems into the Tory camp.

In retrospect, May-June 2010 was the high point for centre-right wingers looking for "regressive realignment" of UK politics along the lines of permanent Tory/Lib Dem majority government. Some Tory cabinet ministers like Mickey Gove were seriously thinking about backing a Yes vote in the AV referendum, which had potential to deliver a right-wing parliamentary majority parliamentary presence even if Labour recovered to between 35 and 40% in the polls in subsequent elections - as well as marginalising the threat of UKIP to the Tories from the right. But this idea of permanent coalition fell apart within a few months. The AV referendum led to huge animosities surfacing between the Tories and Lib Dems; and, even more seriously for Clegg, the Lib Dems' popular support - collapsed from over 20% to less than 10 - while Clegg found himself as the most unpopular party leader since records began.

The reason for this was that millions of people who voted Lib Dem in good faith in 2010 - wanting a "new politics" and a more attractive centre-left alternative to the increasing authoritarianism of Labour - found that they had in fact voting in an enabling mechanism for a particularly nasty and reactionary strain of Tory government.

My feeling is that those people are going to be very hard to get back, and it's not clear where the new Lib Dem voters are coming from to replace them. Why would centre-right Tories abandon David Cameron to vote for Nick Clegg next time round? We can probably assume that the 8% or so of people still in the Lib Dem camp are the "orange bookers" who are pro-Europe and keen on civil liberties but basically Tories on the economy and public services. There doesn't seem to be any huge constituency of non-Tory centre-right wingers out there - if there were, the Lib Dems would have probably won the last election (at least on vote share).

So, with Clegg having permanently alienated the centre left, as long as Clegg  remains Lib Dem leader all Ed Miliband has to do to win the 2015 election is turn up, really. This is good news on the face of it, but also carries the huge danger that Labour could win next time without any coherently defined policies and be a disaster. More on this in another post (hopefully in less than 2 months time) shortly.

Reading back on this, I'm not sure it's saying anything I haven't done already, but I was just desperate to get something into the blog domain during August. And so here it is. 

The "Glib Dems" - from spineless collaborators to willing collaborators?

Despite being on holiday this past week, the fact that we stayed in the UK meant that I was exposed to more of the Liberal Democrat conference than I'd have liked to. As far as I could tell (which is mainly from Channel 4 news bulletins), the mood of the conference was rather different in 2011 than 2010. Last year there were significant rebellions against coalition policy - particularly on free schools. This year, a threatened rebellion against the NHS privatisation bill didn't get off the ground (the motion to hold a debate on the bill got more than 50% of delegate votes but didn't get the two-thirds it needed to pass).

There appears to have been a shift in how most of the Lib Dems are perceiving and positioning themselves. Last year, they were a sell-out and a prop for the Tories and they knew it. The squirming embarrassment of Vince Cable over tuition fees was the foremost example of this. The party looked to be heading for some kind of collective brain seizure.

But now... it's rather different. Sure, Huhne and Cable's speeches hit out tokenistically at the extreme right of the Tory party but overall there was suprisingly little criticism of the Tories. Instead, all the most stinging criticism was reserved for Labour. Clegg was particularly scathing - something that Ed Miliband will welcome, I think. After all, the experience of the AV referendum shows that these days the public normally does the exact opposite of what Nick Clegg says.

Last year I had pigeonholed the Lib Dems as spineless collaborators, unable to speak up for their progressive instincts because they had signed a Faustian pact with those bastard Tories. But now... they're still collaborators, but for the most part, WILLING collaborators. They actually BELIEVE in the shit policies they are foisting on the public.

Even Vince Cable - who give a similar cardboard cut-out "radical" speech to last year - is pursuing an extreme right deregulatory agenda at BIS. And Vince is certainly the extreme left wing edge of Lib Dems in government. The others are much worse.

Are the activists swallowing this shit? I think, by and large, they are. There is disquiet (as the NHS vote showed) but not enough to upset the applecart (again, as the NHS vote showed). The Social Liberal Forum - which is the social democratic fringe of the Lib Dems - doesn't have the numbers or the parliamentary leadership to challenge Clegg, and seems reluctant to split off from the rest of the party. There is probably also a sample selection effect going on here; many of the Lib Dems who were pissed off with the decision to go in with the Tories left in May 2010 or soon after, to join Labour or the Greens. Likewise, the Lib Dems claimed that thousands of new members signed up in the wake of the coalition deal... these will have been right-wingers, almost certainly. (I don't know what's happened to Lib Dem membership recently... some people said the conference hall looked a bit sparsely attended but that could have been because they'd hired a bigger venue than previous years? I don't know).

So basically, this is becoming (or has become) a right-wing party indistinguishable from the Tory mainstream except for a few issues: Europe, civil liberties, and maybe crime and national security.

Which means, more or less, that the advent of the "ConDems" has moved us from a political system with one right-wing party and two centre-left wing parties to a system with one left-wing party(at least in theory) and two right-wing parties. (Plus the Greens, UKIP and the Nationalists, of course). Under first past the post, it seems to me that Labour is the likely beneficiary of this shift. The Lib Dems will find it very hard next time round to take any votes off Labour from the left of the spectrum, as Charles Kennedy did with some success in 2005. Nor will they easily be able to rely on the more nebulous "new politics" schtick which produced the Cleggmania bubble of 2015. Instead, they will be out there at stage right, fighting to make the Tories look as reactionary as possible while copying their economic arguments and anti-Labour rhetoric...

So, from "Fib Dems" to "Glib Dems" it is, then. The Lib Dems have made their choice... it's a right-of-centre party from now on. They have gambled on shifting the political centre of gravity so far to the right that there will be room for two right-wing parties to co-exist successfully in future elections. Can this strategy work? The polls at the moment suggest there's no way in hell (and that's without boundary changes, of which more another time). But there is still a long way to go before 2015, and my new prediction is that the coalition will last until then... because many of the people in the Lib Dems who could take it down have already left.

On holiday - like the Lib Dems' collective brain

Having a nice time up in west Norfolk - a great area of the country for foodies and beach walkers, for sure. This keeps me away from mischievous activities like watching the Fib Dem conference - although not from Twitter, where I have been enjoying regular dialogue and argument with left and right.

The most amusing aspect of the current Fib Dem exercise in mass self-delusion is the feeling that somehow they have turned the corner - despite the fact that their YouGov opinion poll rating is around 9%, unchanged from where it was in January - and Nick Clegg is still enjoying staggeringly low ratings with the electorate. And so the party faithful (those that haven't walked away in disgust) console themselves in a fantasy.

The set piece speeches are a cross between George Orwell and Monty Python: Tim Farron telling the members to "stop complaining" - i.e. be happy with your lot, acting as as appendage to the Tory Party. Simon Hughes - who gave a good speech at the Compass conference back in June, to be fair - saying that the Lib Dems were reining in "extremist" Tories. Strange then, Simon, that key Tory policies like savage spending cuts - and even key Tory policies that weren't in their manifesto, like NHS privatisation - are being nodded through. And the ministers - Clegg, Teather, Alexander - are even worse than that. We will no doubt see the standard left-wing football rattle speech from Vincent Cable later in the week - at the same time that he is attempting to dismantle the employment regulation structure of Britain. And all along, these bastards will be claiming that they have "taken poor people out of tax" when in fact they have slapped a 2.5% VAT increase on the poorest in society, cut benefits for the poorest in society, and only a tiny proportion of their £17bn income tax personal allowance increase actually helps the poor. Not for nothing do they carry the tag "Fib Dems".

But I don't hate all Lib Dems - and that differentiates me from some of the more tribal Labour Party types in the blogosphere. For example, I think Evan Harris is a fine upstanding left-wing secular rationalist who should be the party leader. Sadly, he lost in 2010 - mainly because he was a shit constituency MP and pissed off too many people. That was an idiotic mistake to make; but his profile is nonetheless very high, and if he walked out - perhaps to start a new left wing party (the Progressive Liberals? The Social Liberals? Plenty of possible names out there), possibly to join Labour or the Greens - he could take a lot of people with him. There is a thing called the Social Liberal Forum who are trying to take back the Lib Dem party from the Orange Book right wing nutters who have taken it over. We have already seen a fightback against right wing extremism in the Labour party, in the shape of Ed Miliband (although the process is still incomplete) and it is possible that Social Liberal Forum could pull off the same trick in the Lib Dems. What they lack at the moment is a high profile leader - it seems that all the potential Lib Dem leadership contenders, even the more left wing ones, are biding their time. Or maybe there just aren't any left wing Lib Dem MPs any more.

But I am in regular contact with several fine upstanding left-wingers in the Lib Dems - and my friendly message to these people is, GET OUT NOW. You are doing the Tories' dirty work for them, destroying an honourable political party, and tarnishing your own reputations. PULL THE FUCKING PLUG, form a new party (or join one of the others) and start living the real deal rather than a lie. The country will thank you for it, and you'll feel much better.

Stop bugging me man - I'll kick your F**%ing teeth in...

Or so said the character Nick Curran (played by Michael Douglas) in the Paul Verhoeven film from 1992, Basic Instinct. Thus bugging or hacking into phones for the purposes of providing journalistic exposes has become one of the most momentous (to paraphrase Hal Berstram) events in the country's recent political history. The rapid collapse and closure of the country's largest selling newspaper, the News of the World in a desperate attempt to forestall further fallout was truly stunning. Indeed it appears that the scandal continues to claim victims, with Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson following News International Senior executive Rebekah Brooks in resigning.

Over at 'Comment is free' they appear, to paraphrase Agent Albert Rosenfield from Twin Peaks:

'to have been snacking for too long on the local mushrooms'

and we see the frenzy in full force. What does it portend for the future of British democracy? A trip through the Guardian's comment pages appears to be reminscent of a trip through one of Star Trek's parallel universes. David Cameron's political obituaries have been written by various ex-Soviet sympathisers and veteran fellow travellers, and opposition Leader 'Miliband E' or 'Mr Ed' (named after a 60's American show involving a talking horse) is suddenly touted as a 'man of courage' for his sudden conversion (after being part of two administrations who shamelessly courted News International for the previous three elections) to greater transparency on media ownership. Prize chameleon Nick Clegg adds to his reputation for principle and veracity by shamelessly exploiting the scandal to try and shore up his collapsing vote. All we need now is something from Chris Huhne and the confusion will be complete.

So, is the Coalition finished and more importantly, is the phone hacking affair the figurative 'end' for Cameron? I think not but would agree that I had reservations about using as tarnished a figure as Andy Coulson in any kind of advisory capacity, especially given that the phone hacking scandal has been running in 'Private Eye' for at least the past eight years. Whilst I wouldn't want to see public policy dictated by Ian Heslop and co (they probably would be less than enthusiastic than I am) even a cursory glance at this journal would have raised (or should have raised) serious question marks about his suitability. Nevertheless, Coulson is no longer in position. The question becomes whether Cameron knew that he was involved in phone hacking when he hired him - at the moment that doesn't seem the case and I do not see how the pro Sino Guardian can have any indication otherwise.

The alleged phone hacking incidents took place during the period between 2004 and 2008, which unless I am very much mistaken, saw a Labour government in power. (and one of the worst ever seen in the country's history, of which 'Mr.Ed' was a key part) Thus the nauseous eruptions from Mr G.Brown esquire, returning to the Commons after a year's sabbatical rank as some of the most hypocritical ever put on the record in Hansard, as in deference to the Guardian's staff some of them have recognised.

Is the scandal damaging to Cameron, and by extension, the coalition? for sure, but a quick read through 'Comment is free' or indeed the BBC website will reveal the real significance of the scandal. Neither the Guardian nor the BBC have ever been enamoured of the greater circulation and currency of the News International publications. This is seen as an ideal opportunity to circumscribe the debate and significantly narrow the range of right wing viewpoints available to people. In a wider context, I'd argue the significance is in fact far greater, potentially in the US, where the New York Times (which I read most days over here)and, by extension the Obama White House, are sharpening the knives for Murdoch's Fox News channel. If, as has been speculated, there was hacking of 9/11 victims, then the consequences could be even more far -reaching than they currently are. However, in a UK context, let us not delude ourselves this is more than an aberration, and not an opportunity to limit political discourse to amicable discussion between acolytes of the Guardian and BBC.

Last thoughts on AV: bad question, sad answer

Well, the AV referendum was lost by about 70% to 30%.

My erstwhile friend Tom Clark of the Guardian offers - like a vastly more erudite Jason Donovan - 10 good reasons why Yes lost. I won't duplicate that here because it's a fantastic analysis and I've covered a lot of similar ground in previous posts anyway. Instead I'll offer some thoughts on why AV was the wrong question to ask - and where future efforts at voting reform might go from here.

AV is a piece-of-cack voting system, really, mainly because it's too similar to First Past the Post to get far enough away from the huge problems with that system. Most obviously, it's not proportional. As the main (and justified) complaint of the Lib Dems (and before them, the Alliance, and before them, the Liberal Party) about the British electoral system was that it was not proportional, it's a bit odd that they settled on a referendum on a system that didn't address their main complaint. "Ah", the Lib Dems will tell you, "but the Tories weren't offering that." Fine - they should have said "no deal" then. And then allowed the Tories to go ahead with a minority govt. They would be in a far, far better place now had they done that. It would have been the Tories, not the Lib Dems, who lost 700 local council seats today.

In the event, the main pragmatic argument from the Lib Dems for voting yes to AV was that it was a stepping stone to further reform later on. But that would imply that AV was a more proportional system than FPTP - and there is no strong evidence for that. So therefore, the 'stepping stone' argument was always shaky. As was the argument for voting yes on its own terms. It was a fuzzy, confused campaign, for a "miserable compromise", neither-this-nor-that voting system. And that, coupled with the inept way the campaign was put across and the uniquely catastrophic contribution of Nick Clegg, did for it.

So what next for electoral reform? Unless we get a freak result where a shrunken Lib Dem party can nonetheless hold the balance at the next general election, it's going to be a long while before they're in a position to demand a PR referendum - and even less likely that anyone will agree to it. So it's down to the other smaller parties in that case - particularly the Greens and UKIP. And if we're looking to those guys to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament - it's gonna take a while to happen. Current MP totals: Greens - 1, UKIP - zero. The best chance for PR is that one party becomes so dominant (the Tories for example) that there is an 'anyone-but-Tory' electoral pact across hundreds of constituencies to vote in MPs who will legislate for a PR system, followed by fresh elections. Possible... but hard to pull off.

But if this wretched referendum has had any value, it's the way the "Fib Dems" have become a salutary lesson to any third party that thinks it can sell out principles for quick power, and play fast and lose with its voters. Any third force emerging in the future - and I think the Greens are most likely - will have to act with much more principle than the Fib Dems to be taken seriously. And that, in the end, is a good thing.

Local elections: will Labour bloggers pls refrain from the Kool-Aid...

Well, most local election results, and the Scottish and Welsh results, are in now (but not the AV referendum - that's announced tonight) so time to have a round up. In fact, I'll focus on English local elections and probably follow up about Scotland and Wales separately (if I feel I can contribute anything sensible to what's already been written on those elections).

The first thing is that despondent Labour bloggers thinking of drinking the Kool Aid (the worst example of this I've found so far is on the terminally pessimistic - and misnamed - Labour Uncut) need to take the bottle back to the shop, buy half an aspirin instead, suck on it, and think things over.

Yes, the Tory vote held up at about where it was in last year's election. But the Fib Dem vote has collapsed. We've gone from a 3-party system in local government to 2 parties and a bit player (plus the Greens, who made some tremendous advances).

So what did you expect? Huge decreases in the Tory vote? That would be more likely if Labour and the Lib Dems were knocking spots off the Tories. We'd probably have seen that if this was a minority Tory govt.

But instead we have a Tory-led govt with Fib Dem collaborators - and the collaborators were punished. The net effect of all the switching between different parties was that the Fib Dems were down by about 10% from last year, Tories unchanged, and Labour up 10%.

And that's a great result.

If Labour gets (say) 39% of the vote at the next general election, and the Tories get 36%, it will emerge as the largest single party - and probably win a small overall majority. Even with the boundary changes, and even with the reduction in the number of seats.

What more do Labour supporters want?

Well, plenty more, of course, and it would be foolish to deny that the Labour machine is not firing on all cylinders yet - Sunny Hundal identifies a lot of the problems in this excellent post for Liberal Conspiracy. My own interpretation of why Labour didn't do even better would stress the following:

• the party is still largely a policy-free zone. The policy review is scheduled to run until autumn 2012, at least. If you haven't got much of substance to put to the electorate, it puts you at a disadvantage.
• You can win a big protest vote even if you don't have detailed policies - but you need to give people a sense that you're on their side to do that. Huge numbers of people are pissed off about virtually every aspect of this govt. UK Uncut and False Economy have been leading the fight against the ConDems; Labour has dipped a toe in the water, but hasn't really done anything of substance, and indeed has sometimes been openly hostile to the anti-cuts movement. So, not surprisingly, Labour is still part of the problem, not the solution, for many people.
• Many Labour bigwigs were out campaigning for No2AV - in open opposition to Ed Miliband, and in support of Dave Cameron. Remember the classic game Downfall? "Be careful - you could be helping your opponent as well as yourself!" Probably a couple of percentage points of that Tory result, at least, is due to the hard work of misguided Labour politicians and activists. Well done guys and girls...
• There is still a huge debate going on within Labour about whether to target the Fib Dems or the Tories as the enemy. I'd like to think that political activists were capable of fighting on 2 fronts at once, but maybe not. So, although the Tories took quite a lot of flak at the time of the VAT rise and the Budget, the crossfire seemed to thin out in the campaign itself. Again No2AV had a lot to do with this because their obvious enemy was Nick Clegg and hence this spilled over into the local election campaign.

Of these points, if the policy review is any good it will put paid to the problem of having no policies(!) And it's in Labour's own hands whether it provides a convincing 'Plan B' alternative to the cuts or not. Neither of these will happen overnight, but the direction of travel needs to be a lot clearer - and I believe, WILL be a lot clearer - by May 2012. The No2AV effect of confusing the campaign and boosting Cameron is a one off, presumably - even the most dunderheaded No2AV activists will now return to the fold.

Which leaves the question of whether to attack the FibDems or Tories. BOTH, obviously (doh!) but bear in mind that the lower the Fib Dems go, the higher the Tory support will be - other things being equal. And of course vice versa. Fib Dems at 15%, Tories at 36, Labour at 40 or so is a little tight for winning a majority at the next general election, but still fine for Labour. Labour at 40 with the Tories on 30 and Fib Dems on 20 would be much better under first past the post (which we're stuck with), of course, but at the moment that Fib Dem vote is the softest vote (so it seems), and better to win by annihilating the Fib Dem vote (even if the Tory core vote is rock solid) than to try to appeal directly to floating Tories, fail miserably, watch the Fib Dem vote creep back up and end up with a rerun of 1992 or something close to it. You take votes from whereever the hell you can get them. It's as simple as that.

So, by no means a perfect night for Labour in England. But a good one, whatever people try to tell you.

Chris Huhne: Game On or Moron?

There has been considerable speculation over whether Chris Huhne is about to walk out of the ConDem government - and if so, what his next move is.

He's compared Baroness Warsi to Goebbels. He's openly attacked CamOS in cabinet. He's thrown a lot of toys out of the pram. But are some of them packed with explosives?

It's possible that all of this is smoke and mirrors designed to remind voters that the Lib Dems still exist, and increase the Lib Dem core vote (and hey, they're up as high as 11% in the latest YouGov tracker)... certainly there were some premeditated mild spats between Cameron and Clegg in the early stages of the referendum campaign.

I think this has gone more out of control than that, though. I think it's likely that Huhne genuinely can't stand the Tory cabinet and has had enough.

But the question of whether he will still be in the cabinet on Friday, or next month, is irrelevant to the survival of the Coalition; he could just be replaced by Laws or another Lib Dem. The interesting question is: will he challenge Clegg for the leadership?

I should say at this stage that I am no big Chris Huhne fan. I'd met him a few times at various roundtable events in London and found him a rather arrogant guy, difficult to like and I suspect difficult for the public to like as well - the closest comparison would probably be Ed Balls. In the Lib Dem leadership contest of 2007, I was backing Nick Clegg - unbelievably in retrospect, but I'd met him a couple of times as well and he seemed a nice guy - which just shows that you should disregard everything I say from now on about politicians' personalities. Having said that, we've got to the stage where it's Any Means Necessary to stop this ConDem govt destroying our society, and so if it has to be Huhne that's the hero, then so be it.

Could he displace Clegg? In this matter, for the first time ever I turn to advice from former Lib Dem director of communications Olly Grender, who writes the most annoying blog on the New Statesman site (even more annoying than right-wing Labour bruiser Dan Hodges, and that is really saying something). Unlike most hacks out there, Grender actually knows how the Lib Dem leadership rules work. Huhne would need either half the parliamentary Lib Dem party to ask Clegg to stand down, or 75 Lib Dem constituency associations to pass a fully quorate Extraordinary General Meeting to pass a motion saying that Clegg should be removed.

Olly Grender suggests this is an insurmountable barrier to Clegg's removal. To me, it looks more like a couple of boxes of Tic-Tacs stacked one on top of each other. Particularly the 75 constituency associations part... remember that Huhne only lost to Clegg by 50.6% to 49.4 in 2007 - in fact, as Van Patten has pointed out, if the votes had been properly counted (I thought Lib Dems were supposed to be the "fair votes" party?) he would have won. That means that presumably a good proportion of Lib Dem constituency associations endorsed Huhne for the leadership - and that was when Clegg's stock was reasonably high. It strikes me that Huhne could win a leadership ballot standing on his head - especially as it's a ballot of party members rather than MPs, and the Orange Book libertarian tendency is even less well represented among rank and file Lib Dems than it is among MPs (there has been some turnover of Lib Dem members since the election, but even so, I'd be surprised if Orange Bookers were more than a small clique at best).

So, assuming that Huhne stands for leader and wins - what then? Pulling out of this wretched coalition would seem to be a given. What I'm not clear on is what happens then. If there were a vote of confidence with Labour and the Lib Dems voting against the govt, and other minor parties also voting against or abstaining, the govt would fall. But then, is there an automatic general election or does Ed Miliband get a chance to form a govt with Lib Dem and minor party support? This is pretty crucial. The Lib Dems might not want to chance their arm at an election with only 10% support in the polls (although their polling might change radically if they left the coalition - in which case they might prefer the election option after all). Would Labour be happier to form a coalition with the Lib Dems under Huhne? Experience from the previous coalition negotiations suggests not, but this is an at least partially revitalised Labour party, and Huhne could be easier to deal with than Clegg. Or would Labour prefer an election with a possible shot at forming a majority government, given existing polling trends (which are more favourable to them than 2005?) Are either the Lib Dems or Labour confident that a Lib/Lab coalition with only a small effective majority could achieve much, before Labour has completed its policy review? Is there a danger that the Tories could regroup in opposition and emerge with a full majority next time round?

It's a very complex and fascinating set of considerations. All this is of course premised on the idea that Chris Huhne isn't just having a hissy fit but is actually serious. I have no idea whether that is the case or not. I hope he's serious... or at least I think I hope he's serious. But my opinion of the trustworthiness and reliability of the Lib Dems, never high at the best of times, is now shot to hell, and I wouldn't be surprised if the last few days of "Dirty Huhne" turns out to have been a storm in a teacup.

The moment I knew YES was going to lose the AV referendum

I've recently become convinced that NO is going to win the AV referendum on 5th May. This isn't because of the recent ICM poll showing No with a 16 point lead. While the movement from a narrow Yes lead before Christmas to a strong No lead now is impressive, I place little store in ICM polling on anything because their headline voting intention numbers are ludicrously biased towards the Fib Dems (who poll 15% on ICM but 10% or less with YouGov or other pollsters) and away from Labour (who poll 42-45% on YouGov but 35-37% on ICM). It is quite simple really: the ICM numbers are made up by the Guardian's extreme right wing political commentator, Julian Glover. I think it's sad that a once-venerable institution like the Guardian allows Glover to get away with shit like this, but there you go. If I was the editor, he'd be toast.

No, what swung it towards No for me was finding sane, rational folks like Chris Brooke and Duncan Weldon moving into the No camp (or at least towards it). I'd expect to find reactionary representatives of Ye Olde Politiks (on both sides of the House), conspiracy theorists, English Democrats, birthers, press barons, Ku Klux Klan serving hot soul food and the band playing "In the Mood", etc. in the No Camp. Like Mos Eisley space port it is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, despite the absence of blasters. But when people like Duncan and Chris move into the encampment... you know Yes has lost it.

I think the main reason that Yes is losing is that they have failed to get Down And Dirty with the campaign in the way that No have. I mean, just look at the No2AV leaflet (one came through our door yesterday): intellectually aimed at the level of an amoeba ("the person that gets the most votes should win the election" - but that DOES happen under AV kids, it's just that the votes are counted differently? HELLO?!) it is consequently good at banging home a simple message to the brain-dead component of the electorate. It also has the MASSIVE advantage of being able to put a big picture of Nick Clegg on the back cover (holding his tuition fees pledge, ho ho) with the slogans "AV leads to broken promises" and "the only vote that would count under AV would be Nick Clegg's". And thus, the man who is deservedly the most unpopular politician in Britain today derails yet another progressive cause.

Yes2AV, by contrast, haven't used their gut punches well. I'd have gone all out and said this was a referendum on whether we want the Tories in forevermore through boundary rigging and gerrymandering. I'd have pointed to the shady big money funding the No campaign. And I'd have put a VERY SMALL picture of Clegg on the cover and said "don't let this slimy punk spoil our chance for change." Yes kids, given the opportunity I could have designed a molotov cocktail of a leaflet which would have knocked the machinations of the No effort into a cocked hat.

Instead we got a truly daft Referendum Broadcast with unintelligible people with megaphones shouting at an Evan Harris(?!) lookalike, and no proper arguments either for AV or against FPTP articulated. No wonder Yes is losing.

There's no doubt that making the case for YES in this referendum is harder than NO. Throughout history, to vote NO, all you need to be is a reactionary stiff-upper-lip bastard. It's an easy line to articulate - "this shall not pass" etc. And you can play on people's fears. Yes is a harder case to make, partly because AV is more complicated than FPTP and also because there is only one status quo but many possible alternatives. And let's be honest, apart from John Rentoul, almost no-one in the Yes camp really wants AV as their preferred system. Most people, myself included, want PR. Indeed if this were a PR referendum I think Yes would be miles in front.

But even with those difficulties, Yes could have still run a much better campaign than they have done. It needed a gut punch to the status quo. What it got was a picture of Ed Miliband and Vince Cable with balloons coming out of their heads. At least Ed has very little staked on this one - with huge numbers of his MPs wedded to the status quo (which tells you something about the crapness of the Labour party in its current incarnation) he was always going to be a half-hearted yes man. For Vince and his fellow Fib Dems, by contrast, this could be the end of the line. That's a nice consolation prize for losing this referendum. But, in the wider sweep of British politics, it's not enough. Hunter S Thompson's "cheap, greedy killers" are winning again, and most of us will be the poorer for it.

I can't think of a deep and meaningful post so let's slag off Nick Clegg

Just posted this on Comment Is Free and I think it bears repeating:

Like millions of others, I was taken in by Nick Clegg in the first TV debate. It's easy to see why in retrospect: Cameron was just awful, and Brown was trying hard but not to much effect. Clegg seemed to be offering something different - a politician who wouldn't lie to you and wouldn't let you down.

And so, five days after polling day, what does he do? He sells out his party and his voters and inaugurates the Fib Dems. By doing so, he ends up REINFORCING the British electorate's belief that our politicians are a generation of swine who will sell them down the river, first chance they get.

EVERYTHING Nick Clegg has said since May 12th, 2010 is a lie - both the broken manifesto promises and the few policies they have managed to persuade the Tories to implement. For example: "we are taking poor people out of tax." RUBBISH! VAT has gone up. They are giving with one hand and taking away with the other. And the AV referendum? Not in either the Tory OR the Lib Dem manifesto, a "miserable compromise" - as you said yourself, Mr Clegg.

Add to that the destruction of state schooling, the NHS and the social security system, and it's probably the worst British govt since the 1930s. I think the Lib Dems will be reduced to about 10 seats at the next election - and people will be very, very wary before giving them another shot at power. A total, complete disaster. And Clegg - a dirty liar.