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NewsJack 2010/11 Week 3: Comrade Cable

2010-11-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 28th September 2010

Yellow is blue, new is old, the Equalities Minister is a gaybasher, and according to Vince Cable's keynote speech at the Liberal Democrat conference this week, left is right. Everyone expected the first peacetime coalition government for eighty years to bend the rules and turn things upside somewhat, but Vince Cable's call to take up arms against the running dogs of Capitalism was still-to coin a phrase-unexpectedly out of left field.

Faithful readers will know that NewsJack loves nothing better than a politician who sticks to his guns and refuses to toe the line, and Vince Cable is a political shitstirrer par excellence. With Labour off duty while it selects a new leader it seems that the government's chief critics has been one of its own members. Vince Cable has a curious position within the coalition: originally an advisor to ministers in the old Labour governments of the 1970s, he clearly feels ill at ease joining forces with the Tories. Like a 'special' boy who goes round looking up women's skirts because he knows that he can get away with it, Cable has been taking full advantage of the fact that the coalition can't really do with him, but can't do without him either.

And what a speech it was. He touted himself as a champion of the oppressed masses against the 'spivs and gamblers of the city' and promised to bring his iron fist crashing down on banks that pay excessive bonuses. I half expected red hammer and sickle banners to fall over the top of the Lib Dem dove in the background of the stage, with The Internacionale playing as he tore off an exquisitely tailored jacket to reveal his Soviet-era boiler suit underneath.

There was, though, something transparently desperate about his speech. Carefully stage-managed (Cameron's blessing sought beforehand and choice exerpts distributed the night before to waiting journalists) it was clearly an attempt to be something it no longer is. Like a forty-something who still cakes on several inches of slap and squeezes herself into the dress that hasn't fit for decades in an attempt to convince herself her looks aren't fading, Cable's speech was a rather sad attempt to re-claim the mantle of progressivism that it forfitted this May and can never get back.

The Odd Couple (TV Review: The Special Relationship)

2010-11-10T08:07:00.001-08:00

Published in The Student; 28th September 2010

Such is the extent to which Michael Sheen has become identified with the man he has portrayed three times that even when he played Aro, the chief vampire in Twilight: New Moon, a little bit of Blair shone through.

The Special Relationship is the third in an informal trilogy of Blair films: The Deal explored his rise to prominence and early conflicts with Brown; The Queen revolved round his role in saving the Royal Family after the death of Diana. The personal and professional relationship between Blair and Clinton is the focus of this final installment before Sheen moves on to other projects.

The first major event of the Blair-Clinton years, the Northern Ireland peace negotiations, is dealt with rather sloppily. The most important lasting achievement of either the Blair or Clinton administration is squeezed into barely five minutes.

The skill and commitment of both leaders is overlooked, and director Richard Loncraine makes it seem that a few brief words from Clinton was all that it took to get Sinn Fein to the negotiating table.

Similarly, the amount of time dedicated to the all the lurid details of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, while entertaining (there is a brilliant part when Clinton’s lawyer struggles to explain the legal implications of a semen-stained pair of trousers - Hillary’s reaction is priceless) did not really have all the much of an impact on the relationship between the two men, with Blair standing behind Clinton and refusing to distance himself from the beleaguered President.

Blair does finally get tough on Clinton when the USA is dragging its feet on the question of deploying NATO troops to Kosovo-and the argument between the two administrations over how to engage Milosevic is rightly explored in detail.

As we know from the recent souring of US-UK relations over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the release of Al Megrahi, the “Special Relationship” is not always that special, and there is often considerable but hidden conflict between the two countries. Loncraine takes us behind the scenes to show us how Blair took the lead, attempting to force Clinton into using ground troops against Milosevich rather than high-level bombing, which would safeguard US lives (and thus Clinton’s poll ratings) but endanger innocent people. Downing Street ultimately briefed against the White House in order to get Clinton to act.

As with The Queen, the women steal the show. Helen McCrory reprises her role as a wonderfully bitchy and acerbic Cherie Blair (“That ‘visionary’ you speak of is also the first President of America up on a sexual harassment charge, Tony”) while Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton is almost perfect as the steely, determined power behind her husband’s throne.

Sheen’s suitability for his role was a forgone conclusion, and Quaid makes a surprisingly convincing Clinton: incredibly intelligent but also a politician in every sense of the word.

The decision to ignore Iraq (Loncraine originally decided to include both Clinton and Bush) will be a controversial one because far more than Northern Ireland or Kosovo, it tested where Blair’s true loyalties lay. The last scene-with Blair talking to Bush on the phone as he watches Clinton leave Chequers - perhaps hints that another installment is to come, but in the meantime we must be content with what is an insightful and thoughtful exploration of these two figures - even if it doesn't quite reach the high standards set by either The Deal or The Queen.

Diane Abbott Interview

2010-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student, 15th September 2010

Image: Cat O'Neil

For most of the past 13 years, Diane Abbott has been - to use a phrase applied to another left leaning female Labour politician - a political bag lady to the New Labour hierarchy. A figure alien to the polished metropolitan Labour elite, popping up very now and again in the House of Commons or on late night TV to lob some left-of-centre grenades at the leadership. Sixteenth century European kings had a ‘fool’ who would entertain the court by making fun of the king and his subjects; one of the only people who could openly criticise the monarch and get away with it because he was known to be a figure of fun and essentially harmless. Abbott has played a similar role these past 13 years; a sort of jester to the court of King Tony and Queen Mandy.

Her critiques of the New Labour project - well constructed though they were - never had much impact given her isolation within the party and the hegemony of ‘third way’ thinking. She seemed destined to join the ranks of Dennis Skinner and Clare Short; Old Labour lefties wailing in the wind as the centrist consensus slowly rumbles by, leaving them behind. In light of the financial collapse and the defeat of the New Labour project at the polls, however, Abbott has emerged as a popular and significant (if not entirely conventional) contender in the race for the Labour leadership. It came as a surprise to many - to herself even- that she announced her candidacy on Radio 4’s Today programme back in May. It was on one of her trips to visit Scottish party members that I met up with the MP for Hackney North & Stoke Newington.

That Abbott is not your average Labour leadership candidate is clear as soon as she enters the slightly shabby and sparsely populated meeting room in the St George’s West Church. No cameras, no entourage and with no fanfare at all, Abbott walks in inconspicuously through a side door and sits quietly in the front row, waiting for the meeting to start. In the spare few minutes before she made her speech to local party members, she talked to me about her vision for Labour’s future, her plans to revive Britain’s economy, and the struggle to balance a political career with a ‘real life’ as a mother.

Frustration at the lack of variety in the other declared candidates and the unwillingness of others to make a challenge irritated Abbott into standing for leadership: “The other candidates are all nice and would make good leaders of the Labour Party but they all look the same. The Labour party’s much more diverse than that. I looked at the field and said ‘If not now, when?’ And ‘If not me, who?’”. Commenting on the somewhat contrived way she got onto the ballot – David Milliband ‘lent’ her some of his nominating MPs, resulting her in getting the required 33 just one minute before the 12.30pm deadline, Abbott criticises the way the system seems to be stacked against there being candidates from all wings of the party standing for the leadership: “I think it’s an artificially high barrier, and in an election like this, we need to be able to choose from the widest set of candidates.

Abbott’s main pitch is as the candidate closest to the Labour party’s grassroots: “I don’t have a lot of money or as many staff as the other candidates, but what I do have is a set of political beliefs which fits more closely with mainstream Labour party opinion than any other candidates. The other candidates are all wringing their hands and regretting what the party did in the past and come out with a left wing narrative, but if you press them on their policies, they haven’t changed all that much”. She is worried that the party will face a prolonged spell of opposition unless it shows it is willing to change. She warns repeatedly that the party will suffer the same fate as the Tories after 1997 if it chooses ‘the anointed heir’ instead of electing someone willing to bring new thinking. It will show, she says, “that we have learnt nothing. The country is looking to see if we are going to leave those [New Labour] days behind, and I am the candidate best placed to do that.”

Travelling around the country canvassing for votes has opened the London MP’s eyes to the need for a region-by-region approach for both rebuilding the economy and running a political party: “When you get outside the M25, you really see that the British economy is different from place to place, you see how much of the country was left behind by the stress the New Labour government placed on the city and financial services. From my constituency in East London, you can see the towers of the city of London, but my constituents, my people, haven’t shared that prosperity.”

Abbott is less quick to jump to a criticism of the New Labour project than one would expect, and is supportive of the policies she stood for election on. “I am very proud to be a Labour MP and I supported what was in the manifesto." Where Labour went wrong, she argues, was when it strayed beyond what it promised in its party platforms: “Tuition fees were not in the manifesto, nor was sending troops into Iraq or dropping the 10p tax.”

What seems to provoke Abbott’s ire even more than the substance of New Labour is the way the party was run, with the whips cracking down on MPs deviating from the party line, allowing policies not in the manifesto to be implemented despite significant public protest: “The problem with New Labour these past 13 years was that it became a top-down organisation, so MPs became New Labour’s representatives in the constituencies rather than the other way round. We need to get back to a grass-roots form of politics, where individual MPs are seen as representatives of their communities, not an advocate of their party in their community. The leaderships of both parties need to be more prepared to value independent-minded MPs.” More freedom for local constituencies to choose their own candidates must be, Abbott argues, at the core of rebuilding Labour as genuinely grassroots party: “Nearly all four of my rivals were parachuted into their seats, they didn’t really have a local connection there. Parachuting in has really undermined democracy and undermined local parties."

It is on the subject of civil liberties, however, that Abbott really comes into her own. Getting up from her seat and striding into the crowd, she declares that it was ‘shameful, absolutely shameful’ that Labour introduced compulsory ID cards and authorised the imprisonment of the children of asylum seekers in detention centres. “We abandoned the civil liberties issue, and let it go to the Lib Dems. If I were leader, I would take the issue of human rights back, and put it at the heart of the Labour platform.” She is at her most convincing when arguing that it is a mistake to label some policies as inherently left wing and thus automatically abhorrent to the middle classes that New Labour has courted so assiduously. “Wherever I go, whoever I talk to - about re-nationalisation of the railways, for example - young, old, left wing, right wing, I get a great reaction. If you are willing to be clear and willing to be radical, you will be surprised about who will decide to support you.”

What is clear about Abbott compared to other left-wingers is she has thought through her socialism in a much more electoral-strategic way and has clear vision of how Labour can go about winning new supporters without compromising on its core beliefs. Abbott is sceptical about the need to cut the deficit quickly, and singles out defence to bear the brunt of what should be cut: “There’s a huge propaganda push that says that we need to make these cuts in the public sector but that’s based on the idea that a national budget is like a personal budget; if you owe money, you can’t spend it. But it doesn’t work that way in a national budget. In order to get out of the deficit, we’re going to have to have more jobs, more growth, more production, and all that takes investment. It is interesting that politicians abroad, like Obama, are warning that the cuts the government are making will take us back into recession. I would make some cuts, but mainly with defence-Trident [Britain’s nuclear weapons system], and I would bring our troops home from Afghanistan.”

The formula for cutting the deficit suggested by the Coalition government - 80 per cent spending cuts to 20 per cent tax increases is “completely wrong, completely unsuited to recovery”, she argues, “because, one man’s public sector cuts are another man’s job losses. It is no way to get out of recession.”

Her old Labour credentials shine through when she outlines tax increases on the banking sector as one of her key policies aimed at rebalancing the economy: “I would raise a lot more money from taxation, I would double the bank levy, bring in a financial transactions tax, and keep the 50 per cent top rate of income tax”, all of which would be used to invest in future growth. “Investment in housing and transport infrastructure, in particular, is key to growing our way out of the recession."

Abbott is indignant on the question of the media furore around her decision to send her son to private school. “At the time I gave a clear answer and continue to do so. It shows what’s wrong with the media, they don’t talk about issues, they don’t talk about what my programme is, they just want to talk about something that happened ten years ago.” Sitting with her in a nearby bar with party members after her speech, it is hard to imagine any of her rivals - “the geeks in suits” as she calls them - in the same position. She kicks off her shoes, leans back in her seat and knocks back a few glasses of wine while she reminisces about past battles with some old friends who have come to see her.

There is a naturalness about Diane Abbott that puts you at ease as soon as you start talking to her; you very quickly get a sense that this is someone who has considerable experience outside politics and is as much a ‘real person’ as a politician. Perhaps, though, that is her problem: the reason why Abbott is unlikely to win is a lack of imagination. Conditioned by decades of white men in suits running our political parties, it is difficult to imagine a middle aged black single mother as Leader of the Opposition and a potential Prime Minister. But as Abbott herself said in the last debate of the contest, “People say I don’t look like a Labour leader - no shirt, no tie - but in the 21st century, in a multicultural country that is part of an increasingly globalised world, perhaps this is what a Labour leader should look like.”

Redefining the centre

2010-09-27T08:18:00.004-07:00

Published in The Student; 27th September 2010

The battle for the Labour leadership has ended and it is one the party has won. For the first time since John Smith was elected in 1992, the party has a leader that is broadly representative of its mainstream opinion but still in touch with the feelings of the wider electorate. However, as is often the case in politics, the more important battle-over how Miliband's leadership and policy platform is percieved and defined-has already begun. It is this which will determine whether he enters No.10 as Prime Minister or whether he becomes the next in a long line of Labour leaders enamoured by their party but not by their country.

The Tories were quick out of the gates, labelling the new leader as 'Red Ed', referring to his pledge to keep the 50% top rate of tax and the fact that it was the Union vote that put him over the top: His brother had the most first preferences amongst both MPs and amongst members.

However, while Ed certainly does bring a breath of fresh air after 16 years of New Labour, he represents a new strand of thinking that is neither as unimaginative and anodyne as New Labour was, but nor as introspective and stubborn as Old Labour. It is something that can't easily be labelled as 'left' and the new leadership should ensure that it isn't. His stance on increasing the minimum wage of £5.93 to a living wage of £7.50 has already been adopted by the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who hardly could be said to be on the left of his party). Minimum wage policies have been adopted around the world by governments of all hues as sensible, pragmatic measures to save money on income supplements and poverty relief measures that are needed when people don't earn enough to support themselves from their employment.

Similarly, advocating higher taxes on banks to reduce the need for cuts to deal with a deficit caused by an irresponsible banking and financial sector is not only widely popular amongst the public but becoming part of a cross-party and international consensus: Why else would the Business Minister in a right wing, ultra pro-buinsess government spend his party conference speech "Shining a harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour"?

His support for including Trident in a strategic defence review would aim not to dismantle Britain's independent nuclear deterrent but would seek to save billions that could be redirected to frontline services by making them air or land-based.

All of these policies are representative not of a swing left but a sensible reappraisal of what the centre ground of politics is after seveal years of significant economic and political upheaval. What both his brother and the rest of the New Labour old guard haven't realised is that the centre ground never stays the same. A nationally-run free health service was attacked as a harbinger of Communism in the 1940s, but is now the sacred cow of British politics, prized right across the spectrum. Just like the Second World War changed what was both politically possible and politically neccessary, so have the political and eoconomic crises of the past few years. There is no reason to believe that the centre ground of politics in the next 20 years will be the same has been in the previous 20.

Ed Miliband rightly said the morning after his election “I am for the centre-ground of politics, but it is about defining where the centre ground is." Labour should be at pains to emphasise that its agenda is not neccessarily about left or right, but about doing right.

It is the battle of definition-to define the centre ground and in turn define New Labour's position relative to it that Miliband has rightly taken on and will be the key to Labour's future.

NewsJack 2010/11 Week 2: The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

2010-09-27T08:17:00.001-07:00

Published in The Student; 21st September 2010

Readers of NewsJack will know that aside from being a bottomless goldmine for the budding political satirist, American politics seems to inhabit a completely different political universe form us over here in Merry Old Ingerland. The Republicans in particular appear to be living in a different world at the moment, with their Primary voters booting out the party's experienced standard-bearers left, right and centre in favour of a veritable Wonderland-esque cast of freaks.

At the head of the table is of nutters is, inevitably, former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin.

Growing tired of having to, you know, do the job to which she was elected, the Bimbo-in-Chief stepped down from the Governorship last year after less than three years in charge and now spends her time travelling round the country dispensing blessings like some sort of dodgy televangelist. An endorsement from Palin, no matter how hammy or badly grammaticial (her speeches are packed to the gills with 'refudiations' of her political opponents), appears to virtually guarantee Primary victory, no matter how chequered your history or personal life. And nobody has a more chequered past than Palin-approved Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. For starters, this is a woman who objects to the phrase AIDS 'victims' because "they bring it on themselves", and believes that homosexuality can be 'cured'.

Earlier in life as a teenager, she apparantly dabbled in witchcraft and unlike most American teens on their first date, her suitor didn't feel her up in the back of a Chevvy but took her for "a midnight picnic on a Satanic altar". Well, if she's got nothing else to offer for Delaware's voting public, at least she can whack out her cauldron and whip up that cure for homosexuality she's so keen on. Perhaps this will help her win votes in place of those she will inevitably lose for her stance on masturbation. She believes in your freedom to blow the shit out of anything with a sawn-off, but the freedom to touch your own genitals? No chance.

And another thing: this is a woman who believes that “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.” Well, Chrissy love, if there's so many spare brains going around, maybe you can ask for one?

News Jack 2010/11, Week 1 - Waltzing Widders

2010-09-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Five months since the last issue affords NewsJack no end of material ripe for satire. The Brokeback Mountain-esque homoerotic aura of the Cameron-Clegg adminstration is almost too easy, as is the cringe-fest that is Blair's biography (such is the ropeyness of the Cherie-Tony sex scenes, a second career as a Mills & Boon novelist beckons). The latest stage in Ann Widdecombe's post-political career, though, is too good an opportunity to pass up.

Aside from Harriet Harman presenting Blind Date or David Blunkett having a go on Takeshi's Castle, no politician is more ill-suited to a gameshow than the hard-right former Prisons Minister is to appearing on Strictly Come Dancing. Predictably, her debut on Saturday night was first rate car-crash television. Wearing a floor length gown with more material than all the other women put together, she looked like one of those novelty toilet roll covers made to look like Spanish Flamenco dancers. She is brilliantly mismatched with that gurning idiot, Anton du Beke, and the two look like a 'special' son and his mother going to a one of those tea dances that I've always imagined they have quite alot of down in Toryland.

Perhaps one of those colossal boobs his heavier than the other, or maybe because she's been leaning so far to the right for so many years, Widders tilts so curiously to one side when she's talking to the hosts that she had me checking for subsidence in the floor underneath my TV.

There was also a strange bit towards the end where, as a giant planet sucks a passing minor moon into its orbit, Widdecome grabbed hold of the tiny Paul Daniels, the two melding into one smothering, sequined embrace.

All that said, there is something quite wonderful about Ann Widdecombe. She could almost be the subject of that famous Jenny Joseph poem about growing old disgracefully; 'When I am old, I shall wear purple'. She's one of that ever-dwindling group of old school politicians who stick to their guns; set in their ways and secure in their beliefs, unwilling to kowtow to the media or the party line. Waltz on, Widders, waltz on.

Retrospect Design...p.13

2010-04-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

Retrospect Design...Contents Page

2010-04-17T14:34:00.001-07:00

Retrospect Design...Front Cover

2010-04-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

NewsJack Week 10: Senate Smackdown

2010-03-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; March 23rd 2010

Back over to America this week as former lady wrestler and former Chief Executive of the World Wrestling Federation Linda MacMahon throws her flimsy collapsible chair into the ring in the Senate race to succeed the rubbish angry Santa lookalike incumbent, Chris Dodd.
Many thought that her campaign was just another bizzare plot twist in the ever-shifting Hollyoaks-on-steroids saga that plays out in the ring each week, one part of which was-put unintentionally hilariously by Wikipedia-when "The MacMahon marital feud reached a climax at Wrestlemania 17 when Linda awoke from her comatose state and kicked Vince in the groin".

Being caught in a head lock and pile-driven face-first into the floor watched by tens of millions of people isn't the sort of thing people look for in a Senator but the denizens of the staid northern state of Connecticut seem to be welcoming her with open arms. Thirty nine per cent behind to begin with, she's now surged into a ten-point lead over former Congressman Robert Simmons, described by our very own editor Kim as resembling "an upside-down teabag".

One of the things I've noticed about the US and UK legislatures compared to other countries is how relatively peaceful they are. Slag off your opponent in Turkey and he'll fucking lamp you one. Perhaps McMahon's election to the Senate will innnagurate a new era of violent political debate to US politics. Need to break a Fillibuster? Sod rounding up 60 votes to move a cloture motion; just grab a conveniently placed 2 x 4 (covered in barbed wire, obviously) and keep pumelling him until mouth is so full of blood he can't go on talking. They could rip out all those elegant Georgian desks and replace them with 100 pasting tables cut in half and glued back together again; suplex the Majority Leader into one until he gives your latest pork-barrel project the nod. Fancy being Senate Foreign Relations Chairman? No need to hang around for three decades waiting for everyone else to die off; just goad him into a cage fight by calling his wife a skank.

An Austrian action film star is Governor of California and a male stripper Masachussets Senator; anything can happen. Inappropriately tight spandex at the ready; One, Two, Three....

A Victim of History

2010-03-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; March 23rd 2010

“Don't do it for me, don't do it for the Democratic Party, do it for the American people. They're the ones looking for action right now”, were Barack Obama's words on health care reform to fellow Democrats this week. By the time you are reading this article, it should be clear if Obama's party has heeded his instructions. Even without the benefit of a video to watch his delivery, it is easy to imagine how he made this statement, with a clear sense of dignity and purpose. The current 'compromise' bill is es “Don’t do it for me, don’t do it for the Democratic Party, d The current ‘compromise’ bill is es “Don’t do it for me, don’t do it for the Democratic Party, do it forthe American people. They’re the ones looking for action right now”,were Barack Obama’s words on health care reform to fellow Democrats this week. By the time you are reading this article, it should be clear if Obama’s party has heeded his instructions. Even without the benefit of a video to watch his delivery, it is easy to imagine how he made this statement, with a clear sense of dignity and purpose. The current ‘compromise’ bill is estimated to cost $940 billion and the debate on health care has utterly polarised the nation. With no public option and the retention of fines for the those without health insurance, many of those Americans whom the bill sets out to help will be penalised. This will fall heaviest on ethnic minorities; overall 15.3% of Americans are uninsured, compared to 19.5% of blacks and 32.1% of Hispanics.The question is why has the bill only a chance of passing in its present form, rather than the ambitious overhaul of health care initially imagined by the President, seemingly so possible just a year ago.

The majority of Obama’s promises have failed to materialise, from the closing down of Guantanamo Bay to rapidly redeploying troops from Iraq to Afghhanistan. A fact that has got lost in recent history is the relative narrowness of Obama’s victory. Moved by the history of it all, the media presented Obama’s victory as a national revolution, a hero being swept into office on a tidal wave of support. Due to the vagaries of the electoral system he did sweep the electoral college but he only just scraped 50% of the vote; as blatantly rubbish McCain and Palin were, they still got 47%. A few handful of Presidents-Bush Snr, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower (twice), Roosevelt (four times) and a good many more have bested Obama’s result. Whatever their individual reasons, very nearly half the population didn't vote for Obama, hence why he's struggling just as much Clinton did. Crucially, Obama's run for the Presidency unified the different parts of the left but did nothing to bring together a country that has been riven down the middle for decades. At the end of the day, the support that Obama used to get into office was not only fairly limited relative to quite a few of his predecessors but soft and vulnerable to fairly rapid erosion.

Obama’s difficulties highlight the perils of campaigning on nothing more than the need for ‘change’ (take heed, Dave). He did have policies-good ones, bad ones, mediocre ones-but didn’t really campaign on them; he didn’t use the campaign to win support for his policies that would have come in handy later. Right through the campaign there was a failure to get over the fact that Obama was not Bush and not white and so when it came to crunch-getting recaltricant lawmakers to vote them through, they were not faced with the broad public support for Obama's policies equal to that for Obama the man and Obama the idea.

There seems to have been a lack of forward planning on the part of the administration. They appeared to have expected the force of the movement behind Obama to make the Blue Dog conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans fall into line. Instead, the administration ended up following moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe round like a lovesick puppy and still ended up losing most of them again.

Most of all, Obama is limited by history. The US constitution was written in an atmopshere of paranoia about the consequences of too much power concentrated in one place and so the system was set up to put as many roadblocks to big policy changes as possible. The Founding Fathers were scared not only about the possibility of another King George-style despot but of the people getting their way-the constitution was an explicit response to the elected state legislatures who were too radical for their liking. This is why it took an extra hundred years after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to get legal equality for African Americans.They created, at least in constitutional terms, a very weak Presidency with very little formal power. Instead, Presidents have to exercise influence in other ways, the back-room dealing that Johnson was such a master at and used to achieve such landmarks as the Civil Rights Act and Great Society welfare reforms. Obama and his staff are too inexperienced, have risen too quickly to have developed the same skills.

Strangely for a country born of a revolution, all change in America is incremental. Everybody-the administration, Obama supporters and the media-will need to get used to the idea that he will have to be the first in a long line of Presidents aiming to build a more humane America.

The Checkout Manifesto

2010-03-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; 16th March 2010

I’ve had some strange debates in my time as a student. "Which Pokemon would you shag if you had to?" was certainly one of them, but perhaps the most heated was one I had recently on the subject of supermarket self-checkouts.

I happen to love them. Maybe I was a checkout assistant in a past life, but I still get a little frisson of excitement when my Basics noodles get the beep of affirmation. All the fun of playing with the scanner but without the 12-hour days, minimum wage and crap working conditions.
Standing in the queue waiting gives you the chance to survey an entertaining tableau of people locked in battle with the machines, trying to scan their milk for the tenth time and staring slack-jawed at a bunch of broccoli.

I’m in a tiny minority, though. The biggest complaint is that they’re not actually any quicker than the staffed ones. Perhaps true, but that’s because we let anyone use them. The other day I was stood behind a guy so glacially slow that I came close to wrenching his tomato soup out of hands and doing the whole sodding thing for him.

The solution: tests that everyone does like GCSE English should have a checkout component at the end. Once you’ve finished writing ten pages of pseudo-academic shit about Carol Anne Duffy, you can’t leave the exam hall until you’ve scanned a variety of common household items. Fail it and you’re banished to the Epsilon minor slow-lane for the rest of your life.

Not interacting with a human being is obviously a downside, easily resolved by having celebrities voice them - I’d love to hear Stephen Fry asking me to put my items in the bagging area. He’d be great, making saucy comments when you scan a packet of condoms. Celebrity voices would also solve the problem of people being too slow. You would have, say, five seconds to scan each item: do it in less and the machine congratulates you, bathing you in the dulcet tones of Judi Dench.

Take longer and you get Malcolm Tucker shouting a choice line from his vast litany of insults ("You’re about as useless as a marzipan dildo", "Hurry the fuck up, or fuck the fuck off, YOU MASSIVE GAY SHITE"). That should get people to speed up and force the too old, slow or stupid to get back to the normal checkouts where they belong.

Right Foot Forward

2010-03-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; 9th March 2010

Last week former Labour leader Michael Foot died at the age of 96. A giant of both pre and post-war politics, Foot was one of the great minds of his party but ever since his unsuccessful tenure as Labour leader he has been portrayed both by the media and his successors as a relic of a previous political age, out of touch with public opnion. Foot was elected in Labour's move leftwards in the early 1980s, given the impossible job of uniting a party divided between right and left. He went into the 1983 election with a radical leftist manifesto, advocating the scrapping of nuclear weapons, nationalization of key industries and an expansion of the welfare state. Labour suffered its worst defeat, slumping to 27% of the vote, only slightly ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, the forerunners of the Liberal Democrats. Mrs Thatcher's huge win (144 seat majority) has been used by Labour modernizers ever since as proof that British people will never accept socialist policies, thus justfying the transformation of the party into New Labour, abandoning most of its principles on the way.

However, the Labour modernizers' reading of the 1983 election is highly selective and a fairly blatant distortion of what actually happened. The first thing to highlight is the importance of the Falklands war. Before the war, Thatcher was the most unpopular Prime Minister since records began and the Tories were third in the polls, behind both Labour and the Alliance. Galtieri's invasion and Thatcher's crushing victory pulled her out of the doldrums and she rode the ensuing wave of jingoism to victory but had it not been for the war, Foot almost certainly would have been Prime Minister and Thatcher consigned to the footnotes of history. If you look into the polling data that exists on the public's policy preferences you will find that the electorate consistently rejected Thatcherite policies all the way through her time in power and backed Labour positions in most policy areas. If the public were really hostile to Labour's socialist policies, the polls would have shown a steep drop in Labour support after the publication of the so-called 'Longest suicide note in history' manifesto. In fact, no such drop happened and Foot was right in the race all the way up until the last few days, when Alliance support surged. The reason why Labour's defeat was so huge was because there was a split in the left-leaning vote between Labour and the Alliance, with the vagaries of the electoral system turning into a massive but unwarraneted victory for Thatcher. Thatcher actually lost votes compared to the previous election, yet this has not stopped Labour modernizers since then arguing that the British electorate is essentially centre right and that the Labour party can't ever win on a left-leaning platform.

Looked at today, Foot's 1983 manifesto is largely both sensible and in-tune with public opinion; the party proposed tighter banking regulations and the nationalization of irresponsible banks, stricter controls on lending, energy conservation and the the scrapping of the Trident nuclear missile programme. Labour ministers now jump on some of these policies as 'sensible solutions' despite having portayed them as the unworkable, backwards ideas of the 'loony left' for more than three decades.

New Labourites queueing up to laud Foot should take a step moment to consider the irony of what they're doing; they pissed all over his record for years in order to advance their own distorted view of Labour values and are having to praise him just at the very time that he is being proved to have been right all the time.

Brown Sugar Daddy

2010-03-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; 9th March 2010.

As Catriona Curry

Blair had his ‘babes’, Cameron has his ‘cuties’ and now even Brown is getting in on the act with his new generation of ‘Brown sugars.’ Yes, high profile women in politics may seem like an ideal way for political parties to gain more media attention, and if this is what their aiming for, then it’s clearly working. It emerged last week that GMTV’s Gloria De Piero is being backed to take Geoff Hoon's seat in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. Die Piero once beat Kate Moss in a “World’s Sexiest Woman” poll. However, this is not the first time that Gordon has added spice to his campaign, the original ‘Brown sugars’ helped him to vistory in the race for Edinburgh University Rector in 1974. The girls donned miniskirts and t-shirts bearing the slogan “Gordon for me!” One of the girls who featured as one of the '74 ‘sugars’ recently admitted the idea was to show ‘a bit of leg to give it a boost.’

However, the new generation of Brown’s ladies have dropped the miniskirts and replaced them with more conservative suits, but in some constituencies all-female lists have riled Labour activists, who claim that Labour senior party officials are attempting to ‘parachute’ in favoured women. Some argue that, back in the sixties and seventies, women such as Barbara Castle and Margaret Thatcher had still managed to come up through a system which had blocked them at every turn and today's prospective female politicians should be able to do the same. The 1997 General Election saw a large influx of women into the House of Commons after Labour's use of all women candidate lists, but very few of them have proven themselves their equal of their predecessors. The middle and lower reaches of the ministerial ranks are packed to the gills with mediocre women ministers who won their seats via all women lists, none of whom show the tenacity of Thatcher, the brevity of Shirley Williams, Castle's passion or the campaigning spirit of legendary 1930s MP Ellen Wilkinson. Few of those that have made it to the Cabinet have been impressive. Jacqui Smith was elected on an all woman short-list and she proved to be a bumbling, ineffective Home Secretary and was uncovered as one of the most prominent 'flippers' during the expenses scandal. The Liberal Democrats have the largest proportion of female councillors of any political party in the country, but they have a policy of not discriminating on the grounds of gender or race. This might give us an indiction that the political culture of the two main parties is to blame and that discriminating in favour of women is just a sticking plaster and doesn't deal with the real problem.

David Cameron has pushed hard to get women to be selected in winnable seats, but while the Tory benches may have more women on them come June, is this inherently a good thing? One of his most high profile women stood as a Labour candidate as recently as 2006 and the Tories knew this when they selected her-another indication that Cameron's push for more women is little more than a cosmetic exercise.Is it really fair that women are giving a helping hand in British politics, and more importantly, do women really need a helping hand? Emily Davison presumably didn’t throw herself under King George V’s horse just so that women could be given constituency seats on a silver platter. Why can’t female politicians gain seats in an equal and fair manner, with men and women running together? Is it fair to ban men from standing for their home seat for their party in favour of women parachuted in from elsewhere? Like men, women should stand purely on merits alone, and if there is a problem regarding attitudes towards women which leads them to not being selected, then it is clearly these attitudes that require changing.

A few weeks ago the press trumpeted the election victory of Laura Chinchilla who won a landslide Presidential election in Costa Rica, a country with a very traditional paternilist society. A victory for women, it would appear. However, she is vehemently against abortion, the pill, and all other reproductive rights and is likely to do little to advance the cause of her gender. The victory of a woman is not the same as a victory for women. Reducing the issue of women's participation in politics to their gender is insulting and does nothing to tackle the real barriers to their participation in national life.

On Expenses

2010-03-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; March 2nd, 2010

Like that glut of films about 9/11, I was a bit suspicious about On Expenses being broadcast so close to the events in portrays. The expenses scandal was a national orgy of exaggerated disgust about something we all, deep down, knew was happening anyway, if not in the lurid detail that eventually emerged. We all took part in it, and there was a risk of On Expenses being a worthless continuation of what we’ve been exposed to ad nauseum over the past year simply indulging our jumped-up sense of outrage. Praise is due, then, for writer Tony Saint’s extremely well-researched and revealing insight into the origins of the biggest political scandal of the this century.

Like many others, I assumed that the whole thing had been dug up by The Daily Telegraph, but On Expenses revealed that the whole thing was the result of the campaign of one lone frustrated woman, going all the way back to 2005. Given that we already know every single gory detail of what went on, it is extremely wise of Saint to focus more on the unknown back story to the scandal. Anna Maxwell-Martin plays Heather Brooke, an American former journalist having a mid-life career lull frustrated with a country she sees as overly bureaucratic, elitist and secretive.

With the passage of the Freedom of Information Act , Brooke launches a one woman legal campaign to get the Commons’ authorities to come clean on expenses. Enter the wonderfully puffed-up Speaker Michael Martin, portrayed brilliantly by Brian Cox. Not only does Cox look and sound exactly like Martin, but he captures perfectly someone who started out as an outsider, a former radical trade unionist born into one of the poorest areas of the country, someone who should have been outside the tent pissing in, but got sucked into the establishment and works flat-out to uphold it against the interests of those he is meant to represent. Martin is the focus of the programme’s surprisingly small number of gags; swigging Irn Bru out of a plastic bottle in the opulence of the Speaker’s residence, and wandering around attempting to play the bagpipes in his full Speaker get-up.

The promotion of On Expenses as a ‘comedy’ was overselling slightly: the humour is fairly subtle (MPs walking around with John Lewis carrier bags) but as a result tends to get lost too far into the background, especially in the middle when the focus shifts to the plethora of court battles and committee hearings, when the whole things gets a bit dry.
The most surprising thing is how badly Brooke comes off. Again, it would be easy for her to be written as hero, a long crusader against an evil establishment, a sort of one woman repository of the nation’s spleen. In contrast, she comes across as a rather sad and pathetic figure, unhealthily obsessed with herself and not doing it all for the sake of transparency and openness but as an attempt to jump-start her career (hence her anger at The Daily Telegraph for hijacking ‘her’ campaign).

At some points she is so over the top that you start feeling sorry for Martin and the other MPs. Equally, while they are not let of the hook ("This freedom of information stuff applies to us as well then?" captures their aloofness and arrogance perfectly), it pokes fun without becoming the 50-minute mass lynching it had the potential to be under a less careful director.
This was a long overdue levelling of the playing field and a welcome injection of sobriety into the expenses scandal.

On Expenses doles out punishment to both sides, reminding us that we are partly at fault for not previously paying enough attention to what goes on in Westminster and pointing out that most of us would probably have done the same thing and that our politicians did nothing that hasn’t been going on everywhere for time immemorial.

Poll-er Coaster

2010-03-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Published in The Student; March 2nd, 2010

The traditional politician's line about opinion polls is that the only poll that matters is the one held on election day. However, a recent seismic shift in recent polling data has set alarm bells ringing in Tory HQ and is putting an unexpected spring in Gordon Brown's step.Apart from the occasional blip, the polls have, until recently, told much the same story: The Conservatives would will win a forthcoming general election by a landslide, with as much as a fifteen per cent or more gap between them and Labour. The gap shrunk in the new year to around 10% (the minimum the Opposition need to win an outright majority) and has recently narrowed to 6%-8%, deep into hung parliament territory.

A poll released on Sunday by YouGov shows an even greater tightening;. with the Conservatives leading 37:35, with the Liberal Democrats on 17. But it is too early yet to know if this represents a new trend, or is just a deviation from the well-established 6%-8% gap. If that result was repeated on May 6th (the most likely date for an election), Labour would be the largest party (albeit without a majority) and Brown would stay as Prime Minister, a result deemed unthinkable just a few months ago. In addition to asking about voting intention, polling organizations also ask a number of questions about the respondent's opinions on policy matters and on what they think about the parties and their leaders.

The answers to these give us a clue as to what might be behind such a noticable and sustained change in the polls. Economic confidence has risen: The voters now know that the economy is out of recession, a recognition that will be boosted by the uprating of the quarterly growth rate from a nominal 0.1% to a more solid 0.3%. More importantly, given that economic confidence is a very unstable figure, is the inexorable recovery of Labour as the party most trusted party on the economy. This went into freefall in 2008, but now Brown-Darling have recovered and now lead Cameron-Osborne. There is a recognition that, whoever was to blame for the recession, the government probably did do the right thing.

On the opposite page, Josh Jones takes quite a dim view of the ability of voters to understand the issues of the deficit, national debt and economic growth, but on the contrary, the polls would suggest that the voters understand all this rather better than the media give them credit for: Voters have not so much been scared off by the admirably brave Tory pledge to cut the budget 'savagely', but have made a shrewd calculation that this could stall the recovery that the country has spent so much money trying to attain. The Tories know this and are backpedalling spectacularly, with the budget cut pledge now down to a paltry £1bn. There is also a long-noticed tendency for the governing party to rise in the opinion of the voters in the last months before an election (although not usually as much as this) because they are to a much greater extent thinking about how they will actually vote, not simply giving a gut reaction.

A changed political context is part of the story as well: In 1997, the Conservatives were hated and Labour, if not loved, welcomed by a significant chunk of the electorate. However, the next general election comes in a very different political age; politics and political parties which makes it impossible for Cameron to generate a wave of genuine enthusiasm that would push him into government in the same way that Blair was able to. Caution, though, is due. These polls cover all 646 constituencies, but general elections are not won in Glasgow East or Surrey South West but the hundred-or-so marginal seats where only a few thousands votes separated the parties last time. Crucially, Cameron has managed to hang onto a lead (around 10%) in these constituencies, despite losing it nationally.

The Tory campaign is exceptionally well organized in these areas, and the party is pouring every last penny of its £18m war-chest, outspending Labour by millions.All this means that the general election campaign will be crucial. The last three elections have been forgone conclusions-the last time an election was won and lost during the course of the election campaign was when most of us were still in nappies, in 1992. All the more so given that there will be a new feature-televised debates between the party leader, which have proved to be game-changers in US Presidential elections. A recent survey showed that a large proportion of students are not planning to vote, but they are wasting an opportunity they might not get for another two decades. For the first time in years there is not only a genuine fight between the two parties, but a decent ideological gulf between them. Go register now at http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/

Not all spending is created equal

2010-03-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

Image: Only vaguely related, but amusing.

"Cutting spending would harm the economic recovery" (most Labour ministers). True. But not all spending of any type has an equal impact on the economy. It depends how equally the spread.

If were to get rid of one of our Trident-carrying submarines, making up the difference by sharing one of them with the French navy, then this would have much less of an effect than say, cutting the equal amount from benefits. Benefits are paid directly into the pockets of millions of low income citizens who then spend it on day-to-day goods in British shops. The bulk of defence spending will go straight into the pockets of the board members; ordinary people would of course lose jobs (sailors, mechanics, and so on) but nothing like the number affected by benefit cuts. A similar logic applies to tax rises. Poorer people don't take their money abroad as much as the rich; they buy fewer luxury foreign-manufactured goods, go on fewer foreign holidays, and so on. It is therfore much better to tax the rich than the poor.

All this is really basic economics, but something that the government should be deploying in defence of its economic policy. Making a reasoned defence for cutting certain areas of the national budget than others not only reassures the markets that serious cuts will be made but makes it clear to the electorate that deficit reduction will take place in a way which not only will minimize the risk of derailing the recovery but be the most equitable.

NewsJack Week 6: The Big Clunking Fist Returns

2010-02-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 1st March 2010

Up until recently, Gordon Brown has been remarkable only in that every single piece of shit thrown at him by the media and opposition has stuck, to the extent that he should by now look like that 6ft turd of children's television, Bungle, of Rainbow fame. However, by some miracle, he's more than halved the Tory lead in the polls, and come out of the latest smear campaign cleanly, if not smelling of roses. Brown is alleged to have acted violently towards his staff, with the Chairwoman of the National Bullying Helpline claiming that several No. 10 staff had called her organization complaining about bullying.

However, it all went tits up for the enemies of The Great Leader when Christine Pratt, who looks like someone you'd end up in bed with at a shit middle-aged swingers' party in Coventry, was forced to admit that none of the complains were regarding Brown, amidst a wave of resignations from the NBH board. If the polls are anything to go by, this hasn't done Brown any harm at all: People don't want a shrinking violet as PM; they want someone passionate who will come out swinging for the country when times are bad. I quite like to think Thatcher probably had a switch-blade hidden away in her handbag, ready to shank anyone who disagreed with her or that Major glassed a few people in order to get the Maastricht treaty through. Or indeed that Churchill plucked out his enemies' eyes with his 'v for victory' sign and that, East-End style, Wilson spat vodka in people's faces and lit them up like a Christmas tree with his trademark pipe.

The best thing to come out of this is an absolutely hilarious Hong Kong news channel video that shows a series of mock-ups of what is alleged to have happened; Brown goes round punching people for no apparent reason, and he spectacularly throws a slow-typing secretary across the room. The whole thing reminds me of that Family Guy episode where the Griffins move to Texas and encounter Chuck Norris, who goes round punching small children with a third fist concealed in his chin.

Go on Gordo: Next time that smug Etonian bastard shits on your economic record, lean across the dispatch box and nut him back onto the opposition benches where he belongs.

It's not all Greek

2010-02-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 16th February 2010

Ever since the dawn of the Greek debt crisis, the press has been flush with speculation that Britain is fast heading for the sinkhole that Greece, Spain and Portugal look to be heading down. However, such claims rest on a superficial and misleading comparison of the two coutries. For a start, both countries' public sector debts are high, but still worlds apart. Greece has a debt of 120% of GDP, with the UK's being about half that.

The maturity of debt that a country holds is also important to consider in assessing its position. Average UK debt maturity is high (about 14 years) compared to most other developed countries, double that of France and Germany, and many more years longer than Greece. The Greeks will have to deal with about 10% of their debt in their next few months; a huge amount in such a short space of time. Britain has far longer to service a smaller amount of debt. This means that it is much more expensive for Greece to service its debt; Britain's debt servicing will cost around 3 percent of GDP; Greece, about 12 percent. As long as the debt is affordable, it can continue to grow for a while and not do us much home. So, while Britain is indeed heavily indebted, it is actually in a much less presurrised position in terms of paying it back than Greece, France and even prudent Mrs Merkel's Germany.

Another difference is that as part of the Eurozone, Greece shares a currency with with fifteen other countries and so can't devalue its currency, which can help in boosting a country out of recession via exports. However, the UK is in a much better position in this regard given that its currency has lost about a quarter of its value in recent years.

Credibility and confidence matters. While it may not have been what it was, financial markets have reason to be more confident about Britain than Greece. The Greeks have long struggled with an uncompetitive and unproductive economy and, like other small countries, has suffered more from falling business and tax revenues. UK competitiveness is improving fast partly because of the flexibility of its labour markets, which means that companies can more quickly and easily change in response to the great shifts in the economy that we have experienced over the past two years. In the past, we have been willing to grit our teeth and think of England while enduring public spendings cuts. The Greeks have not yet proved this and, if the mass protests and strikes against planned cuts are anything to go by, aren't likely to any time soon. Crucially, financial markets know this and will take it into account in their assessments of both countries.

Look beyond the superficial, and it is plain for all to see that Britain and Greece are in very different positions and it would take something huge for Britain to fall into the same trap that Greece is in now. This is why I'm sick to the back teeth of scaremongering journalists and point-scoring opposition politicians talking-down Britain for their own purposes. Conjouring the spectre of Greece makes for good headlines and might grab some votes for an desperate opposition with a rapidly shrinking poll lead, but is fundamentally misleading and does not do anything to help the recovery.

Mo for your Money

2010-02-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; February 9th 2010

Biopics of British politicians are few and far between because British politicians like Mo Mowlam are few and far between. In five or ten years, deep into the next Tory decade most of the middle-ranking nobodies that have staffed the Labour governments will be forgotten and Mo Mowlam will be one of the few that will be remembered, helped in part by Channel Four’s excellent docu-drama, Mo. Starting in the months before the 1997 General Election, we are shown her discovering and dealing with cancer, seeking peace in Northern Ireland, and her decline after her retirement from politics.

I’m not sure if there’s any higher praise than saying that Julie Walters looks and sounds exactly like Mo Mowlam. She gets the high-pitched, prissy voice, the distinctive back straight, tits-out gait and her straight-talking political style all almost absolutely right. Walters is supported by an excellent cast; Steven Mackintosh is a wonderfully slippery Peter Mandelson and Walters’ Billy Elliot co-star Gary Lewis takes on a deservedly prominent role as Mowlam’s deputy, Adam Ingram. David Trimble, Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams are cardboard cut-outs, but at least they looked and sounded like who they were supposed to be (with the exception of Adams, who appears to be played by Groucho Marx).

The most disappointing part, especially for someone who came to it mostly for the politics, is how politically sparse it is. The bulk of the programme is devoted to her work in Northern Ireland, but she doesn’t appear to do anything. She seems to have been little more than a court jester; whipping off her wig and opening her legs in order to unnerve the delegates, but not seeming to do much that contributed to the success of the peace process apart from the occasional inspiring speech. This does her a tremendous disservice, vastly underestimating what she did to bring the two sides together. She was a joker, and she was unorthodox, but she was also a highly skilful negotiator, but this does not really come across because Walters spends most of the time running between rooms batting her eyelids at all and sundry.

There’s a fair number of clumsily-directed scenes: one in which she watches a child with Down's syndrome singing karaoke, and another near the end when she re-visits a care home for young adults she’d opened. These come across too cheesily when compared to rest of the programme, which, by and large, is very shrewdly and sensitively put together. Nevertheless, there’s some extremely harrowing moments that are beautifully done. Not previously knowing what radiography involved, watching Walters having a transparent plastic mask fitted onto her face, and then hearing the menacing electrical buzz of the machine alongside the strains of pop music played to relax her was really quite unnerving and brilliantly executed.

More than one national newspaper reviewer has described Mo as ‘hagiographic’ (portraying someone as a saint). This, though, is very unfair to director Philip Martin. Yes, one of the biggest potential problems with dramas like these is that the central character’s flaws are ignored and the whole thing turns into an hour-long canonization, but Martin manages to avoid this quite well. He shows how she lied to the country about the seriousness of her disease (her cancer was malignant, but she told the media it was benign) despite the potentially perverse influence it could have had on her judgement. More than once, Mo shows that no matter how much she genuinely cared about the future of Northern Ireland, she was a politician first and she aimed for success for what it might lead on to in her career.

It is largely faithful, both to her and to history, and gives us an insight into her life (though perhaps not her work) without cheapening her by laying it on too thick, a balance which other biographies don’t strike nearly as well as Mo does.

Response Article: Pope's comments on Equality Bill

2010-02-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; February 9th 2010

Bethany’s argument rests on an apparently reasonable, but ultimately unsustainable comparison between the Catholic church and political parties. She is quite right in saying that left wing parties could not be expected to hire a member of a far right organization, though this is not a logical comparison. A far right party member could not be expected to make a positive contribution to a leftist party, but there is no reason to suggest that a gay man could not make a contribution to the Catholic church just because he was gay. This is because the Church’s body of teaching is so much more than just opposition to gay sex.

Both parties and religions are broad organizations with a variety of different competing strands of thought, and just as the Labour party wouldn’t stop me from joining it because I didn’t believe in one of its polices, the Vatican should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis that a candidate doesn’t conform to a single, tiny strand of its moralizing. To make this argument one has to assume that the sole purpose of Catholicism is to stop men from sticking their nobs in each other. It’s not.

NewsJack 3: The Dorothy Perkins Taliban

2010-02-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; February 9th 2010

Having already had the big-hitters (Blair, Straw, Campbell, Goldsmith) round for questioning, the Chilcot inquiry looked like it was winding down. However, just as it seemed it was more or less over, steaming across Parliament Square on Monday morning came that ever present shit-stirrer of British politics, Clare Short.The former International Development Secretary is like her own one woman Taliban, popping up from the hinterlands of Westminster every now and again to chuck an IED into British politics. It might be the vast, steel-grey helmet of hair, or the mouth that never moves (even when she speaks), or the fact that she seems to plough relentlessly on, no matter what gets chucked in her way, but I'm convinced she's made out of pure granite.

She's not human at all; not born of the loins of man and woman, but fashioned under the heat and pressure of a Polynesian volcano, dug up by a tribe, dressed in outdated Jaeger suits and dodgy Dorothy Perkins scarves and shipped of to the UK to be a low-ranking Cabinet minister.
Her testimony to the inquiry was classic Clare. True to her volcanic origins, it was if she'd been storing away her spleen for the seven years since she resigned frrom the Cabinet, ready to errupt at the opportune time. Thar she blew; splattering the panel with claims that Blair leaned on Goldsmith to change his legal advice on the wear's legality and that the Cabinet and Parliament were misled into supporting the war, all in that wonderful through gritted teeth Birmingham brogue, the stenographer left in her wake, struggling to catch up. She's clearly a bitter woman with an axe to grind who didn't have the courage to resign when it would have an the biggest impact, but she neverthless has been one of the few mainstream figures willing to expose the corrupt and undemocratic nature of the way decisions are taken in our country.

Stir on, Clare, stir on.

Response Article: Worthless Qualifications

2010-02-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; February 2nd 2010

Matthew is quite right in pointing out the contradictions of New Labour's approach to higher education, but it is a shame that it rests largely on fairly crude, well-worn caricatures of subjects like Media Studies. About half of the second- and third-years of my Social and Political Science undergrad degree revolved around media sociology: I found it an extremely engaging and academically demanding subject that required at least as much work as my tough Economics and Political Philosophy modules. Equally, my undergrad university offered Art History courses, which were also extremely rigorous and one of the hardest courses to pass.

The issue is not so much the content of these subjects, but how they are are taught and examined. There is no such thing as a 'hard' or 'easy' course; courses can be as difficult as those who set the exams and mark the coursework are willing to make them. If a Physics degree is more higly valued than a Media Studies one, it is not because knowledge of Neptune's atmopshere is any more valid than knowing about how newspapers affect our political beliefs, but because more is expected by the examiners, which does not have to be the case. We need to look at making all subjects more demanding and come to a clear, more consistent position on the sorts of skills that a degree - any degree - should demand from its students; create some sort of national benchmark that a course should reach in order to be studied as an honours degree. This would be a much more valuable exercise than indulging in academic McCarthyism, denouncing some subjects and praising others.

NewsJack 2: The Red Light Inquiry

2010-02-07T13:50:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 2nd February 2010

When not in the midst of an essay crisis, I've been spending most of this week watching the very nearly but not quite interesting Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. I was surprised, given how important an occasion it is, that it seems to be taking place in a grotty, windowless basement. The hastily knocked up set, the dim, gloomy atmosphere and the sense that you're seeing and hearing things (at least, in theory) that have been hitherto hidden reminds me of those seedy sex booths you get in the red light district of Amsterdam, with Sir John himself ruling the roost as an ageing, flabby madam.

Right on cue, along comes a tanned, wrinkling, swaggering Blair, like an aging lothario past his prime, but desperate to prove that he still has it; flexing in front of the panel and repeating his "I did it once, and I'd do it again" message over and over again. The panellists are underwhelming; the woman to the right of Chillers, the one with grey, straggly hair, looks like she's been dragged in from the street.And this is essentially what the Chilcot Inquiry is: a faux, contrived peep show designed to show a bit of leg in order to make us think that we know what really went on. Enough to satisfy us, without actually telling us anything we didn't already know.

Talking of things we didn't already know, I'd like to draw your attention to the plight of WikiLeaks. Set up in 2006, the website has recieved millions of documents from concerned whistleblowers. BNP membership lists, notes from meetings of the secretive Bilderberg group, documents relating to illegal toxic waste dumping in Africa and the contents of Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account have all been put into the public domain, thanks to WikiLeaks. However, it has now run out of money and is appealing for donations. Go to http://www.wikileaks.org/ and donate anything you can to keep this vital resource alive.

NewsJack 1: Government Wife Swap

2010-01-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 26th January 2010

Welcome to NewsJack, a thinly disguised attempt to produce a student version of Charlie Brooker; your place for unabashed partisanship, poorly founded assertions and jokes about cocks. Talking of cocks, we did originally plan to call it NewsWank, but some of our writers thought it too childish. We also came up with AngstLad: Diary of an angry young man, but that sounded too much like an upmarket, under-age gay porn film (Dir. Roman Polanski), so we came up with the suitably vague but still a little bit wanking-related NewsJack.

Over the water Obama, predictably, is starting to flounder. Commentators were surprised that the Democrats got trounced in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy, but they shouldn't have. Democratic candidate Martha Coakley was so pathetically wooden that Republican Scott Brown could have publicly sodomised a puppy in the middle of Boston and he probably still would have won. The loss of the party's 60th vote in the Senate means that Obama's plan to extend healthcare to the poorest of Americans is likely to be fillibustered into history by Republicans. A tragedy, but a self-inflicted one; those most vehemently opposing the plan are the people it is designed to help. If half the Deep South ends up walking around with tumours coming out of their chests, then its their own sodding fault.

Obama's relationship with America is like those random friendships you have in Freshers' Week that never get beyond the first week of lectures. You meet up initially, get off your face together and are best pals in the world for a few days, and then when the bedlam of the start of uni dies down, you realise you have nothing in common and spend the rest of your four years having to smile awkardly when you bump into them in Tesco. The bottom line is that Obama is too progressive for the people that elected him; he is way ahead of the majority of the country which is still stuck in 1787, when any form of government, no matter how good its intentions, is inherently suspicious. And you really, really need a gun so the King of England doesn't come over to push you around.

The same is happening here; the UK is esentially a progressive country, but we are about to elect a group of poor-people-hating, gay-bashing, neo-liberal shits who would be much more suited to governing the denizens of Louisiana than those of Lincolnshire.

Perhaps we could arrange for some sort of governmental version of Wife Swap, where we send Cameron and his cronies to Washington and get Obama into No. 10? Let's hope so.

Impersonal Politics

2010-01-24T12:31:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 26th January 2010

On Friday, Channel 4 is screening its highly anticipated docu-drama Mo, detailing the political life of the former Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam. She was a highly unorthodox politician who once told Gerry Adams to “fuck off” and removed her wig during the peace process talks to stop the two sides arguing. Mo Mowlam was one of the great chararacters of British politics: forthright, passionate and much loved by the public. Sadly, we’re losing these figures to death and retirement, to be replaced by a Parliament packed to the rafters with hundreds of party machine-honed clones.

Ever since Blair came on the political scene, members of the commentariat have complained about the increasing influence of personality in politics. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Blair, Cameron et al are carefully crafted products who give only the illusion of personality.

Mo Mowlam, Dennis Skinner, John Prescott, Anne Widdecombe, Tony Banks; they all developed in an earlier age of politics, less structured according to the needs of the 24 hour news media. Now, politicians must always look and sound perfect and can't ever break beyond the cookie-cutter role that has been made for them; no mesage can go out before being nipped and tucked by party hacks and PR consultants, lest they lose face in the press.

Parties, as well as the media, are to blame for all this. The whips' insistence on iron discipline and slavish loyalty to the party line means that people who want to go into politics speaking their mind don't. Most of our politicians spend their whole lives cossetted in the embraces of their party; they graduate from university, go straight into politics, working for a minister or think tank, get elected to Parliament, and in the process, they get stripped of anything that makes them interesting, endearing or likeable.

What happens is that we create a political class of people who seem completely alien to the public. If they can't empathise with the men and women who run their country, then a mass disconnection from politics is inevitable.

I'm not arguing that politics should all be about personality. Politics should always be first and foremost about policy, but the role of personality in politics does, and always has, sat beside policy, never in place of it. Personality and policy have always functioned as a diarchy at centre of politics, with each part feeding off one another. When you take personality out of that relationship, politics ceases to function properly.

Too much, too soon

2010-01-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 19th January 2010
Published in TCS; 21st January 2010

Last week, 14 year old Arran Fernandez became the youngest person since William Pitt the Younger to be offered a place at Cambridge University. The Surrey teenager was offered a place to study physics at Fitzwilliam College, breaking the 237 year record set by the 19th century Prime Minister.

As a former Fitzwilliam student, I’m very much concerned about the motives that have driven the decision of my college’s admissions tutors. I hope that the boy’s welfare has been taken into account as much as the fact that they might have the next Stephen Hawking on their hands almost certainly has. He will be at least 4 years younger than the next youngest undergraduate at the college, and won’t be able to participate in the two activities which-for better or worst-define student life: sex and drinking. University is much more than just academic study and any student-no matter how talented and promising they are-deserves the opportunity to experience everything these three years can offer.

He is clearly very talented, but I don’t see how making him wait 2 years more would make a lot of difference except giving him the chance to be a proper child and enjoy life that he almost certainly has been denied thus far. He could do another round of A-Levels in some art-based subjects, he could go travelling-do something outside the narrow world of maths and exams that it looks like he has been confined to up to now and certainly will never escape from when he starts at one of the most demanding universities in the world.

Professor Joan Freeman, author of Gifted Children Grown Up, studied the lives of 35 child prodigies and found the majority of them ended up as disappointed adults. She asks 'what will they do for an encore if they achieve so much so early?' The National Association for Gifted Children advises parents not to put their children in for exams at a very young age. NAGC’s education consultant Jo Counsell calls pushing children like this a 'cruel experiment' which ignores children’s social and emotional needs.

The press reaction to all this was very telling. All the papers that covered the story did so in lurid detail and gushing tones, fawning over his string of impressive exam results, appended by a disturbing picture of Fernandez when he was 5, holding both his GCSE results slip and a teddy bear. Last year, we were faced with the uncomfortable image of 10 year-old Hollie Steel bursting into tears live on stage during the Semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent. If we’re not careful, we risk regressing back to the 18th century notion that children are merely mini versions of adults and should be expected to do everything adults can do.

There needs to be a very strong reassertion-both in education and the media-that childhood is a separate sphere of life in which people have very different needs that should be protected and catered for. Fernandez’s parents were being highly irresponsible entering him for GCSEs at 5 years of age, but it is the education system’s fault for making this possible at all; children are sat in school halls at the age of seven to do their KS1 SATS; a time when their horizons should extend no further than kicking a ball and making jokes about poo. Our lives are already pressurised enough at it is without exposing people to it when they’re barely out of nappies.

Dan Nicholson-Heap is the former Vice President of Fitzwilliam College Student Association.

Film Review: Avatar

2010-01-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; 19th December 2010

If you’ve read my previous reviews, you’ll know that I usually don’t like overly-hyped films, and no other film has had such an extensive build-up as Avatar. The film press had been reporting for months before its release about how James Cameron has spent many years and tens of millions of dollars developing the technology needed for the film.

There’s a limit to how good a film can be when it focuses on how an evil mining company is colonising a planet called ‘Pandora’ looking for an element called - sigh - ‘Unobtanium’. I actually lol'd in the cinema when I heard that. There’s nothing original about the story line: the mining company embarks on a programme to produce clones of the aliens that look and act like the Na’vi - the native inhabitants of Pandora - which can be controlled by humans.

When one of the scientists is killed, his twin brother - a US marine (who is confined, for some reason, to a wheelchair, ostensibly because it makes him seem vulnerable and with more of a hill to climb or rather, to roll up) is brought in to replace him. His Avatar is sent into the jungle to win over the natives, but ends up becoming one of them, falls in love with the girl and leads the fight against the nasty colonisers.

The plot suffers in much the same way as Cameron’s previous blockbuster Titantic did: flimsy characters; wooden acting; stilted, awkward dialogue. If you don't concentrate, you might be tricked into thinking that he's come up with something original. There's an attempt à la Lord of the Rings to create a complete world with its own history, language, culture and religion. Switch your brain on, and it will become clear what it is: a clumsy pastiche he seems to have cobbled out of one of those accidentally racist anthropology textbooks from the 1930s. The Na'vi are essentially taller and painted-blue versions of African 'natives', with vague notions of all lifeforms being tied together by a natural force: something that could have been interesting, had it been clearly and meaningfully explored. Toward the end, Cameron just seems to give up entirely trying to produce anything remotely cerebral and chucks in what he thinks the public want: scene after scene of shit getting blow up by a guy with a buzz cut.

He also makes some heavy-handed attempts to insert references to modern American imperialism, with one of the mining executives saying that the humans needed to fight 'terror with terror'. Again, this could have worked quite well, but his direction is not subtle enough to have anything deeper without it coming across as contrived and tokenistic.

Don't get me wrong; this is a stunning film in a visual sense. He makes full use of his new technology with lavish flying scenes and beautiful recreations of the rain forest, but there's not much else of worth besides. You'll enjoy it, but only if you turn off your brain and put on the 3D glasses.

Injury Time Column: Cowardly Coyle

2010-01-24T12:10:00.000-08:00

Image: Googled

Published in The Student; 19th January 2010

IT WAS a strong sense that, despite all the problems that returning to the Premiership after an absence of forty years entails, Burnley were exceeding expectations. However, that was shattered by the dramatic and unexpected departure of hero manager Owen Coyle last week.After rumours of approaches from Celtic and the Scottish FA earlier in the season, Coyle promised fans that he wouldn’t leave the club. Hence the bitterness felt down Harry Potts Way over Coyle’s move westwards to relegation-scrap rivals, Bolton.

As I see it, there’s two ways you can look at the former St Johnstone manager’s decision. Firstly, you could see it as him taking the chance he might not have had again to return to the club he has had an affinity with for many years - he played at Bolton during the 1990s.Alternatively, less charitably and probably more accurately, you can see a move by an ambitious young manager desperate to stay in the Premiership and willing to leave a vulnerable club in the lurch to do so.

Adding insult to injury, Coyle wiped Burnley out of all its management and coaching experience; taking Assistant Sandy Stewart and Coach Steve Davis with him to the Reebok stadium. This seemed fairly unnecessary and should be reason enough to take Coyle’s previous professions of affection for the club with a pinch of salt. The decision to take on Owls’ boss Brian Laws to replace looks rushed and ill-thought out, and, given the alternatives, unimaginative. Chairman Barry Kilby and director Brendan Flood had two choices; an experienced, venerable old-hand like Alan Curbishley (who would have been many fans’ own choice for the job) or repeat the gamble they made in 2007 with Coyle and go for a young, ambitious lower league manager with a name to make for himself; Huddersfield Town’s Lee Clark was mooted; they also should also made more of an effort to keep Burnley favourite Davis at the club by offering him the post.

Instead, they’ve abandoned the logic that worked with Coyle and picked a ‘safer’, more experienced but, relatively speaking, much less successful manager. Coyle always reminded me of a ferret; darting eyes, twitchy features, excitable, always running up and down the touchline. Laws more resembles a down-at-heel carpet salesman from Middlesborough. The wrong choice for a club that needs a charismatic, likeable leader like Coyle to rally it through its relegation fight.

Burnley, not the most uplifting of places, was at its brightest during the play-offs last season. When the club had something to fight for, the whole town pulled together. They now have something to fight for again. Regardless of recent managerial politics, it will be that same spirit, with the same players and the same fans that Burnley will bring to the relegation fight. It was enough to get them, against the odds, into the Premiership, and it will be enough to keep them in.

Head to Head Review: New Moon

2010-01-24T11:51:00.000-08:00

Published in The Student; Tuesday December 1st

This film gets one star because Cineworld let me in free. That was literally its only redeeming feature. Kim's told you the plot, so thankfully I can use my column inches to tell you how gut-wretchingly shit this film is.

I understand that its target is, well, not me. Fourteen-year-old girls who have read all the books cover to cover will lap it all up: from the stilted dialogue and straight out of an A-Level English Lit textbook imagery, to the 50% or so of the film which consists solely of lingering shots of that guy's unfeasibly well-toned abs (see picture, left). However, there was almost nothing that would appeal to people outside that demographic.

I get that it's the second in a trilogy, but they could have made a bit more of an effort to make it accessible to those who haven't read the books or seen the first film. I really tried to give it a chance, but I was already asleep on my cinema companion's shoulder after the first ten minutes; waking up to hear "I want to come/Let me come/I'm coming/No you can't", wondering what the hell I'd missed.

The only two talented actors-Michael Sheen and Robert Patinson are confined to about fifteen minutes each, the latter ostensibly appearing as a badly-tuned hologram. The lion's share of the film is taken up by the wooden (and plastic) Barbie and Ken (Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner).

They tried far too hard to get Robert Pattinson and co. to look like vampires; the excess of pale, sparkly make-up made them look like someting that you'd see at Carlisle Pride. Ditto for Lautner's laughably bad hair extensions; his gang of shirtless and tight-trousered werewolves left you wondering whether you were actually watching a shit native-American version of the Chippendales.

The clearly-nicked-from The Matrix end fight-scene is a somehow a fitting end to a film which chucks in bits of every genre it can think in the hope that it will all work out in the end.

It doesn't.

Hanging in the Balance

2009-12-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

"Wanna buy some pegs, Dave?"

Published in The Student; 29th November 2009

Last Sunday, an Ipsos-Mori poll for The Observer showed that Labour
had cut the Tory lead from 14% to 6%. As the Conservatives need at
least 10% to win an outright majority at the next general election,
the media exploded with stories of the likelihood of a hung
parliament. Cue also Nick Clegg, humbly declaring that, as a servant
of the British people, he would support whichever party won the most
number of seats.

Whether we will actually have a hung parliament is only a matter of
speculation, and there's not much we can usefully say when there is
still 6 months to go before the next election. One swallow does not
make a summer, just like one poll does not make a collapse in Tory
support. One thing to note is that oppositions tend never to do as
well as polls say; Labour were registering well over 50% in some polls
in 1996, but fell back to 43% on polling day. The same is likely to
apply this time around; Tory poll leads have hit has much as 20%, with
an average of around 15%. Given that the economy has started to pick
up again and the Tories have been perhaps too open about their
spending cuts, Tory support is likely to fall back moderately,
although perhaps not to the levels seen in the Ipsos-Mori poll. The
consensus among the polling techies is that the drop seen in the
Ipsos-Mori poll was partly due to sampling error, but was also
representative of a modest Labour revival. YouGov for The Telegraph
on Thursday showed the lead has dropped to 10%, which is probably
closer to the truth.

As soon as the 6% figure was reported in the press, talking heads in
the media and both of the main parties were wheeled out to bash the
idea of coalition government. Opponents of coalition governments
paint a vivid picture of hung parliaments producing faction-ridden,
indecisive, mistake-prone governments, but are never able to provide a
decent number of real-world examples. Ireland, Germany, Sweden,
Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and many others have had
coalition governments. Even in a 'grand coalition' with her political
enemies, Angela Merkel had a fairly successful 4 years, and is in a
even stronger position now, even though she is still in a coalition,
this time with the more market-orientated FDP. On measures of Cabinet
stability in democracies, Finland comes out on near the top, even
though there is quite some distance between the constituent parties.
Scotland had a Labour-Lib Dem coalition from 1999-2007 and has a
minority government now, but north of the border didn't suddenly
collapse into anarchy, as opponents of coalition government would have
you believe. On the contrary, we had an imaginative, energetic
government coming up with progressive policies which was consistently
ahead of the Westminster administration on key issues.

Another argument is that coalition government gives too much power to
the smaller parties. This, in theory, is absolutely true. However,
if a third or fourth party coalition partner was seen to be behaving
irresponsibly; holding up the work of government over a few of its pet
issues, it would be routed in an election. In 1976-8, the
majority-less Labour government relied on Liberal votes to stay in
office. The Liberals could have held Callaghan to ransom, but they
didn't. Several commentators this week pointed out that a coalition
would be disastrous given the state of public finances. The Lib Dems
will know that they would draw the ire of the media and public if they
held up necessary cuts, and so they wouldn't.

The Lib Dems have proved themselves responsible coalition partners in
Scotland and Wales, and there is no reason to believe that they would
not do so again at Westminster if called upon. And even if a hung parliament did give the Lib Dems an unfair amount of power, this would make up for the decades of supression that they
have been subjected to. In 1983, they received more than 25% of the
vote, but only 3% of the seats in Parliament, with this pattern being
repeated at all subsequent elections.

I just don't see how we can call ourselves a democracy under the
current system. The 2005 election was won by Labour with 36% of the
vote on a 60% turnout; the government thus took office with a healthy
majority (55% of the seats), with only the support of 21% of the
electorate. A coalition government would mean that a far larger
proprortion of the electorate will have voted for the government that
rules it. Its not the same as Robert Mugabe stuffing ballot boxes.
But its not a million miles away from it.

Roy Hattersely-a Minister in the minority Callaghan government
complained in The Guardian this week that his government had to
constantly lobby MPs in order to win support for its legislation,
instead of simply bullying its troops into the right voting lobby.
Last time I checked, that is how democratic parliamentary government
was supposed to work. A coalition government would mean that there is
would be a greater range of views amongst those with their hands on
the levers of power. This is especially important in a country like
Britain where power is centralised and too few people with too narrow
a range of views has had the majority of the power in the past.

A hung parliament at the next election would produce a government
which would need to look seriously at proportional representation as a
fairer way of electing our legislature. It would be a government
which would need to consult a much wider range of views in order to
get its plans through. It would be a government that would need to
send its ministers to those fairly elected representatives to win
their votes, instead of ramming them down their throats against large
swathes of public opinion. In short, it would be a democratic
government.

Time to Trust

2009-12-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

Image: Genevieve Ryan

Published in The Student; 22nd September 2009

The Home Office has this week been under fire as it unveils its plans to safeguard children. Any person who has “frequent or intensive” contact with children who are not their own must be continually monitored by the new Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). It is thought that up to 12m people will have to be registered.

The VBS is a response to the Bichard report into the failings that led to the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. However, the problem in Soham was not that the police did not know about Huntley- Humberside police had investigated him for allegations of sexual assault, but that the information was not passed onto Cambridgeshire Constabulary. Baroness Morgan-who claimed this week that the VBS would help prevent another Soham forgets that Huntley did not gain access to Holly and Jessica by virtue of his position as a school caretaker-the two girls attended a completely different school. He abducted the two girls when they visited his girlfriend Maxine Carr-their classroom assistant. Even if the VBS had been in place at the time, he could still have had access to them.

Report after report shows that the majority of child abuse happens inside the home and is carried out by family members. Victoria Climbié, Baby P and the thousands of other children killed or abused in their own homes would not have been saved by the proposed reforms. Overstretched and under -funded Social Services could put the £200m the scheme will cost to much better use, employing more and better social workers. This is not to say that proposed system would not stop unsuitable people from getting access to children-such a claim would be impossible to prove: But with severely limited public funds, we need to be putting the money where it is likely to do the most good. A vast database checking up on 12m people, 99.9% of whom will be innocent, is not that place. It goes without saying that the £84m the NHS will have to spend registering its 1.3m workers could be better spent improving standards of care.

No matter how good the intentions, many people will be distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that the government can impose a £5000 fine on people who volunteer in their communities for not requesting that the state subject them to intrusive background checks. The VBS is the latest in a worrying line of government measures, such as Asbos, which extend the power of public authorities to punish citizens without the need to uphold their allegations to the standard of proof required in a court.

Aside from the cost and civil liberties concerns, the system will simply not be practical. The proposed reforms assume that junior sports clubs and other organizations for children can afford to wait weeks while the government checks up on their volunteers. Parents are often called up to help out on a short notice, ad-hoc basis and so the need for help may have passed by the time the VBS checks have been completed. The system would have to constantly monitor at least 20% of the UK population, and the government has yet to show if this could be done effectively and thoroughly enough to justify the cost and intrusion it presents.

There may well be much cheaper and simpler ways to protect children. Sue Gwaspari, director of Community Service Volunteers, the UK’s largest volunteering charity, described the new checks as “disproportionate”. She argues that “vigilance and supervision" on the part of children’s organizations-limiting new volunteers’ access to children at first and not leaving children in the care of a single adult-could prove just as effective. For years groups like the Scout Association have had a comprehensive system of background checking and monitoring of its volunteers without prompting from the government or the threat of steep fines for not doing so.

The VBS risks weakening our already fractured community relations by instilling mistrust. Even while it may not suggest that anybody who wants to work with children or around them is suspect, it implies that they cannot be trusted. Professor Alan Craft, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said "We have created a climate where adults feel they can't put an arm around a child who is upset, and there is a real danger that this move takes us yet further down that road."

Ministers argue that the VBS won’t destroy volunteering because community volunteers will not have to pay for registration, and the vast majority of those subjected to checks will not have to worry because they will have “nothing to hide”. That may be so, but it is not a particularly good argument. If the police were to start doing random checks on people’s homes, then why would that be acceptable even if most people have “nothing to hide”? The Chief Constable in charge of the Soham investigation points out that no amount of vetting, checking and paranoia will make children totally safe. At some point, you need to stop worrying. At some point, you just have to trust people.

It's not over yet

2009-12-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

Image: Susansketchpad.blogspot.com

Published in TCS; 6th November 2008

And that’s it. Its all over. Its 4:30 am in the freezing cold Fitz TV room;, channel flipping, happily surveying the crest- fallen faces on Fox News. Obama has roared past 270 , won by a nice healthy margin in the popular vote (about 7%), and Democrats are sweeping the board in the House and Senate across the country. This morning’s newspapers and news websites had the usual and predictable healines: “History in the making”, “A New Dawn”, “America votes for change”, and so on.

I want Obama to fulfill his promise as much as everyone else, but I can’t help thinking that we’re getting a long way ahead of ourselves. For starters, Obama lost the white vote, and it wasn’t even especially close; with 55% going for McCain and only 43% for Obama, up only two percent on Kerry’s record in 2004. With virtually everyone here supporting Obama, it’s very easy to think he has been swept into office in on a national tidal wave of unanimous support. He’s won big, but he has nothing like the cross-national coalition behind him that the media portray.

The big gains in Congress (up to 57 in the Senate and more than 250 in the House) will make passing reforms easier for Obama, but it will by no means be a walk in the park. The weakness of party loyalty means that, even if the Democrats do have 57 seats, he might not always get 57 votes. And, despite hopes of achieving the 60-seat fillibusterproof majority, it looks like they will fall short, thus leaving reform legislation still potentually vulnerable to Republican fillibuster.

Clinton, another young, attractive, refomer was swept into office with a majority in both Houses, but failed to pass much needed legislation on healthcare reform. Special interests are notoriously well-entrenched in Washington DC. The immense financial power they have over elected representatives means that the wishes of the people will not be the only things wieghing on Congressmen and Senators' minds when they cast their votes next year. ‘The Obama effect’ will be influential at first, but I wonder how long it is before business as usual returns in Washington.

Contrary to popular belief, the US Constitution was at its heart a conservative document, born more of a representative republican spirit than a nationally democratic one. It was designed to make radical change more difficult. The unlimited debate rules of the Senate allowed small groups to block progressive legislation for decades. It will be a test of Obama and his supporters whether they can overcome hundreds of years of conservatism. History provides some pause for thought. In the 1960s, America was in love with John F Kennedy in much the same way many seem to be with Obama today. Yet, throughout his 3 years in office he was legislatively something of a disappointment.

As erratic and misguided as the as the Clinton and McCain campaigns were, they were right in pointing out Obama’s inexperience. The US has taken a significant gamble in electing him, and we can only hope that the public goodwilll and the experienced team he has behind him will help him through. and that the maturity, skill and organization of his campaign is carried into the Oval office.

The 44th President will come to office facing greater challenges than most of his recent predecessors. An ailing economy, two wars, and a still divided country. There’s no doubt in my mind that America (finally) has made the right choice. But Obama will face the same pressures that all politicians will face. Building a popular movement based on fuzzy notions of ‘change’ and ‘hope’ is a great campaign strategy but cannot be carried into government.

After campaigning in poetry, he more likely than not will end up governing in prose. With an Obama victory, the future is looking much brighter, but it is important to keep things in perspective, and be realistic about the months and years ahead, lest we’re left with a nasty taste in our mouths when things don’t turn out quite as well as we hoped.

The quiet man turns up the volume: Iain Duncan Smith Interview

2009-12-18T17:23:00.001-08:00

With Betony Lloyd
Published in TCS; 1st November 2007

Following the annual Vote of No Confidence debate at the Cambridge Union we were privileged to be granted an exclusive interview with the former leader of the Conservative Party – the Rt. Hon Iain Duncan Smith, MP.

A heated debate was highlighted by Quentin Davies being challenged by a Fitzwilliam student and constituent to defend his decision not to call a by-election after defecting from the Conservatives to Labour this summer. The proposition attacked the government for allowing personal debt to rise to unsustainable levels, and there were a number of colourful floor speeches from the audience. An American student ridiculed his own government, claiming we should be grateful that our politicians can “string a sentence together”. The opposition’s rosy description of improvements made during their tenure was met a the cry of “tell that to the dead Iraqis!”. At points, the debate descended into petty squabbling, with speakers, notably Nick Herbert, interrupting and shouting each other down. This behaviour was criticised by Union speaker Will Redfearn who rebuked the politicians: “you’re not in the Commons now”. There were long queues to go through the “aye” door, as the New Labour government was defeated for the first time ever, 302 to 95.

After meeting students in the Union bar the former Tory leader kicked off his interview in the main chamber by welcoming the government’s defeat (whilst admitting the result was not an expression of confidence in his own party). The issue of higher education arose as a matter of personal as well as political importance for Duncan Smith as his own children are now of university age. The MP told The Cambridge Student (TCS) that he had “never been a supporter of top up fees” and whilst his Party is “in a slightly different position” than it was under his leadership, his “personal views” remain unchanged. “There’s got to be a better way than just plunging people into massive amounts of debt”, he continued. “If it was easier for people to get work while they were here then that might be a different case but I think sometimes it’s very difficult for people to get work in the area where they go to university.” When asked to comment on the recent coverage of the appointment of Lord Triesman as minister for students (‘Yes [student] Minister’ Vl.10 issue 5 25/10/07), the former leader revealed his scepticism about “constantly appointing people”, describing it as “cosmetic”.

He was also cynical about the government’s system of quotas and targets for widening access to universities. “If it was going to work it would have worked by now”, he said. “The government’s been bullying universities for the last seven or eight years to get more people from lower socio-economic backgrounds into university.” He believes university authorities have been making great efforts to widen access yet accepts that it is imperative that standards aren’t lowered in the process. He identified that the root of the problem actually lies in the lack of applications from underprivileged pupils, especially to Oxbridge.

Duncan Smith is not concerned about the purported devaluation of degrees but warned of the dangers of the current government’s overemphasis on university education. “The be all and end all of life is not to go to university - I know that might be difficult for this government to swallow. Lots of people out there are not academic and they don’t want to follow an academic life.” He points out the government treats those who do not opt for an academic path as if they are “subhuman”, and that this is “not fair and not true”. He stressed his belief in the equal value of a vocational education, adding that “it takes two different groups of people to make society work”.

When pressed on David Cameron’s progress in ending Britain’s style of ‘Punch-and-Judy politics’, Duncan Smith suggested that it was a “long term process” and that “no solution will be achieved over night”, whilst admitting that the current state of politics is the fault of both the media and politicians. Questioned on the government’s plans to reform the constitution, the MP welcomed moves to restore the power and influence Parliament has lost in recent years. “It is time now”, he said, “to make a big change”.

Duncan Smith also defended the ‘quiet man’ approach he adopted during his time as Tory leader. “The people who get things done in society are invariably the ones who don’t talk about it: they are the ones who do it”, he told TCS. “This is a world of quiet people who you never really hear from…but on whom the whole of society rests….politicians spend a lot of time talking while the rest of Britain gets on and does”. He insisted that quiet determination was a better approach to politics than spin, but jokingly suggested that John Wayne’s film ‘The Quiet Man’, which was re-released following his notorious Party conference speech, may have profited from his approach more than he did.

Like a true politician, Duncan Smith wisely dodged the question when asked if he was planning to attend the Oxford Union.

The X Factor?

2009-12-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

A response to Emma Lough
Published in TCS; 31st January 2008

I happen to be quite attracted to Iain Duncan Smith. Reminiscent of a balding hamster though he is, he’s the sort of guy who would never forget your birthday, or stand you up for a date. Blair or Churchill, on the other hand, would almost certainly leave earlythe following morning, and not return your calls for days. The John Majors and Iain Duncan Smiths of the political world are, in my view, vastly underappreciated. That they were ‘Grey Men’ cannot be denied (though news of John Major’s back-bench fumblings with Edwina Currie did give him something of an injection of colour), yet this does not mean they didn’t play, an important role in public life, and they can still do so.

Churchill was of course a brilliant Prime Minister who almost certainly saved Britain from invasion during the war, but his more staid predecessor Clement Atlee did far more to fundamentally change Britain for the better, and is consistently at the top of ‘Best Prime Minister’ surveys. John Major was not a great Prime Minister, or even a good one, but he personally did much less to damage the country than did Thatcher or Blair. Most Prime Ministers would have struggled with a slowly dwindling majority, a divided party and sluggish economy, none of which were a direct result of John Major’s personality.

Similarly, Iain Duncan Smith is a good politician, and was simply the wrong leader for the Tories at that time. Charisma can certainly help politicians, but it is by no means critical. A quiet, diligent (read: boring) leader such as Germany’s Angela Merkel can be successful: She has managed to revive Germany’s economy, while heading a ‘grand coalition’ government composed of two completely ideologically opposed parties.

For better or worse, a politician is not ‘one of the people’, and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves by calling for him to present himself as such. If politicians sat down, shut up and got on with trying to make a difference rather than worrying about their public appeal, we’d make much more progress than we are doing now.

People think politics is boring because politics is boring: As Emma argues, there is no meaningful distinction between the two parties, and nothing to argue about. Our politicians are products of our politics: There’s a limit to how interesting politicians can be if all they’re arguing about is minutiae rather than making profound changes to how Britain works. The issue of policy is inextricably linked to the issue of levels of political engagement. The way to improve political participation is not to make politicians more interesting, but to make politics more interesting. We need a system in which the issues are genuinely important, where there is more genuine disagreement between parties.

Politicians and political life as a whole will only become more exciting when there is something to become excited about.

Long coalition talks loom after close result

2009-12-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

Published in TCS; 12th February 2009

On Tuesday, Israelis went to the polls but the outcome is still uncertain as the leaders of the country’s two main parties have both claimed victory.

The governing centrist Kadima, headed by Tzipi Livni, has 28 seats and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist Likud opposition party, 27, election officials said. The country’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, ran the headline “Political stalemate” above photographs of both leaders.

The elections were called after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was forced to resign in the face of investigations concerning corruption allegations, and after Livni failed to form a coalition government as newly elected head of the Kadima party, which was formed as an off-shoot of Likud by Ariel Sharon in 2005. Livni attempted to form a coalition with the Shas party, which refused, deterred by Livni’s admission that she might cede East Jeruslaem to Palestine.

Mr. Olmert has remained as caretaker Prime Minister and will continue to do so until a new government can be formed. Observers say that gains by right-wing parties could give Mr Netanyahu a better chance of forming a coalition. On the basis of the exit polls, Likud and various nationalist parties would control 65 of 120 seats in the Knesset, though Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman said his party wanted a right-wing government, but added “we do not rule out anyone”.

While Livni and Netanyahu contest the final results, exit polls show that the Labour party, led by Defence Minister Ehud Barack, has been pushed into an unprecedented fourth place.
Lieberman met with both Livni and Netanyahu, as well as Shas’s leader, Eli Yishay. Livni called on Netanyahu “to respect the choice of Israel’s citizens ... and to join a unity government, led by us, that will be based on the large parties in Israel, left and right.”
Once the results have been certified, President Shimon Peres will talk to party leaders to ascertain who has the best chance of forming a government, but he is not obligated to choose the leader of the largest party.

Whoever is chosen has 42 days to form a new government, after which another leader would be asked. Likud led in the opinion polls until Kadima started to close the gap in the final days of the campaign, which was dominated by security issues as a result of Israel’s incursion into Palestine after rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas militants. Saeb Erakat, of the Palestinian authority, expressed dismay that right-wing parties had increased their share of seats: “It is obvious the Israelis have voted to paralyse the peace process,” he said.

Fury as Premier gets the boot

2009-12-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

Published in TCS; 5th February 2009

The Chinese Government has reacted furiously to the protest of a Cambridge graduate student who threw his shoe at Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday. China’s Foreign Ministry described the incident as a “despicable act” whilst there have been calls for a boycott of British goods on high-profile Chinese blogs. The angry reaction only came after 24 hours of silence during which the story was not reported in the Chinese state media. The eventual admission of the incident was a break from the usual official Chinese state media protocol of ignoring anything of potential embarrassment to its leaders. A YouTube video of the shoe-throwing has received almost one million hits. In the video, the graduate, believed by The Cambridge Student (TCS) to be a 27-year-old Pathology supervisor, is seen shouting “dictator” at Mr Wen. The audience, comprising students and staff, then turned on the student, telling him to “get out” and shouting “shame.” Reports suggest that many in the audience were Chinese students. The protester was then led out of the building by proctors and security staff before being arrested and charged with a public order offence by police.

Mr Wen was in Cambridge to give the annual Rede Lecture as part of his three-day visit to the UK. Earlier in the week, he spoke with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, visited the EU headquarters in Brussels and addressed the Davos economic summit in Switzerland. Greeting the arrival of Mr Wen in Cambridge were an estimated 100 protestors as well as many more supporters. Around 30 protestors from Amnesty International held banners declaring ‘Human Rights for China’ and ‘Remember Tiananmen’. Catherine Lough, Chair of Cambridge University Amnesty International, told TCS: “We are protesting to raise awareness of human rights issues in China and their continued violation. The death penalty is still used. 470 people were executed in 2007 and the Government continues to harass human rights activists and use re-education through labour camps.” However, Ke Rong, President of the Cambridge branch of the Chinese Schools and Scholars Association, expressed exasperation with the protesters. “They are not from China and are not familiar with the Chinese system,” said Rong. “The majority of Chinese support the Government, as you can see from this turnout here today. I think there is a misunderstanding of China by the West and I think stronger ties between our countries are needed.” June Wong, a second-year economist at Newnham, told TCS: “I think expressing one’s anger by throwing a shoe is rude and unacceptable, no matter what his intention was. I couldn’t believe this sort of thing could be done by a Cambridge student. He humiliated himself, not Mr Wen. Shame on him.”

Two thousand students and members of staff applied to the University’s International Office for the 500 tickets available to hear Mr Wen’s lecture entitled ‘See China in the Light of Her Development’. There was tight security throughout the afternoon with West Road closed to traffic as Premier Wen arrived. Mr Wen arrived in a large convoy of at least 15 vehicles. All ticket holders were body searched by security staff, in addition to their bags and personal belongings, before being let into the hall. After a short introduction by Vice Chancellor Alison Richard, Mr Wen presented the University with a gift of the China Digital Library, a collection of 200,000 electronic books and articles about China’s politics, economy, history and culture. He then spoke for 40 minutes on the history of China’s development and the importance of strengthening ties between China and the UK. Throughout, he emphasized the “power of knowledge” and the role that young students have to play in solving the world’s problems. He blamed the recent decline in global capital markets on a lack of morality and said he wanted other countries to work with China to build a “new global financial order.” Mr Wen spoke in Mandarin and his words were translated into English via personal headphones.

The protest came five minutes before the end of Mr Wen’s speech. The graduate protester then stood and shouted: “How can the University prostitute itself with this dictator here?” and “How can you listen to the lies he’s telling?” According to eyewitnesses, he was dragged from the row in which he had been sitting and then threw a shoe at Mr Wen, missing by about a metre. As he was being escorted from the hall, he called on the audience to “stand up and protest and get out of here.” Mr Wen described the protest as “despicable.” He added: “Teachers and students, this kind of dirty trick cannot stop the friendship between the Chinese and the British people,” before continuing with his speech to applause. Sir Christopher Humm, Master of Gonville and Caius, and former UK Ambassador to China, moderated a short question and answer session after the speech.

“Following an incident in the auditorium during the Premier’s speech earlier today, a man has been charged with a public order offence’’ a police spokeswoman said. “The 27-year-old man has been charged with section four of the Public Order Act and will appear at Cambridge magistrates court on Tuesday, February 10”. The University has refused to make an official comment on the identity of the protestor until hearing from the police. Alison Richard, the Vice Chancellor, was quoted on Cambridge’s website stating: “We were much honoured that Premier Wen gave the Rede Lecture this afternoon, and I was delighted to accept his gift of the China Digital Library, in recognition of the University’s 800th Anniversary. “I deeply regret that a single member of the audience this af ternoon failed to show the respect for our speaker that is customary at Cambridge. This university is a place for considered argument and debate, not for shoe-throwing”. The Chinese expressed strong dissatisfaction with the protest to the British government, but made clear that it posed no danger to continued ties between China and the UK: “The Chinese side has expressed its strong feelings against the occurrence of the incident . . . Facts show the troublemaker who conducted this mean act is not accepted by the public, and he will not stop the trend of a developing friendly relationship between China and Britain,” said Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu. According to the newspaper China Daily, Ms Yu also stated that “Britain has apologised for the incident.”

Gordon Brown has yet to comment on the protest. When asked about the incident at a press conference, another Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said state leaders should be respected. But, to laughter, he added: “Next time I should watch out for not only those who are raising their hands, but also those who are untying their shoelaces.” The incident has been widely compared to the shoe-throwing protest directed at George Bush in January. Muntader al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, threw his shoe at the former American president. Mr Zaidi faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted for the offence.

Why aren't we standing up for ourselves?

2009-12-18T15:40:00.000-08:00

Image: Cambridge University Amnesty International

Published in TCS; 16th October 2008

Johnians returned from the Summer break to find that they were no longer allowed to bring their own wine into formal. I myself have been locked into a long battle with the SPS department over not being allowed to do a paper I’m qualified for, and with the Fitz Domestic manager and her army of minions over having “illegal” furniture in my room. A puzzling way to put it, as I’m quite sure that MDF isn’t a Class A substance. Time and time again, our colleges push us around; overzeaously enforcing regulations which are more often than not without any decent reason or logic behind them. They’re not all bad; I’m quite fond of the rather cute Fitz regulation which allows you to have parties in your room and to get as rat-arsed as you like, as long as you provide retro party food.

But more often than not, they don’t do anything but get in the way and spoil our fun. However, the power imbalance between Colleges and students goes far beyond bored bureaucrats and extra furniture. The age of most colleges and the importance of tradition in Cambridge means that the playing field is tipped against the students. So, for example, despite the best efforts of the students, Peterhouse authorities were able to cancel the 2008 May ball. Colleges are supposed to be places for the education of students, but I sometimes wonder whether we should change our name to “Fitzwilliam Conference Centre... and College”, as it seems to be run increasingly for conference guests and not the students for whom the college was originally set up. In the next few years, the entire top half of our main block will be closed to students, becoming a dedicated conference centre. There was no consultation with students; the powers that be decided that it would go ahead. And that it seems, is all that matters.

I’m not saying that our Masters and Bursars are out to get us and screw us for all we are worth; it’s just that they end up becoming too isolated from the students. They begin running Colleges unaccountably and not in the interests of the students. We can rant all we like about money-grabbing Bursars and sinister college pen-pushers, but we must take some of the blame ourselves. True, the odds are stacked against us, but we seem to take that as an excuse not to oppose our college authorities when it is needed. Standing up to our Colleges can work - Kings, for example, had a successful rent stike in 1999/2000, witholding over £400,000 - but most of the time we seem to give up at the first hurdle. JCRs are not always effective in this regard. All too easily, they become separated from the students they are supposed to represent and so when problems arise, the feelings of students are not communicated to those in charge. Again, if we actually bothered to hold our JCRs to account more, maybe the situation would improve. Another problem is the lack of institutional memory in the student bodies. Every three years the undergraduate population is almost completely different and so has no knowledge of what has gone on before they arrived. JCRs need to communicate with their predecessors more and try to build up a picture of what the College has tried to do in the pastand the tactics it has used.The root of the problem is that there is no ethos of resistence amongst the broad mass of students. There may be a few decent handfuls of individuals willing to stand up to College authorities, but we don’t stand a chance unless the broad mass of students can be mobilised. Its all too easy to get wrapped up in our work to worry about the latest rent rise, especially if it will not effect us till after we’re gone. But this selfish, individualist attitude which weakens us as collective against our Colleges. Unless we tackle this sort of mind-set, unless we can re-discover a spirit of opposition which has long since been eroded, then nothing will change, and Cambridge students will continue to be trampled on by their colleges.

(Un)Representative Democracy

2009-12-18T15:31:00.001-08:00

Image: Matthew McVickar

Published in Vivid: March 2009

For those of you who didn’t do classics at school (neither did I, as it happens), we’ll start with a quick Greek lesson. The word ‘Democracy’ derives from the Greek words Demos (people) and Krates (rule). Thus, in the strict sense of the word, ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’. However, by that definition, democracy does not exist, and never has exisited. Ever. What we call ‘democracy’ isn’t democracy at all, but, crucially Representative Democracy. The theory is that the people have a free choice between competing candidates, and the winning groups of candidates implement the will of the people.

Problem 1: Do the winning candidates really represent the will of the people? In the 2005 General Election, Labour won 55% of the available seats with on 35.3% of the vote, with 60% of the population voting. Thus, only 21% of the people actively wanted Labour, but everyone got them. If the Liberal Democrats had got a number of seats proportional to their vote, 142 of them should be sitting in Parliament, instead of the 63 who actually are. I’m not going to go into the many boringly familiar arguments about proportional electoral systems, but I fail to see how a system which skews the stated will of the people so badly is that different from Mugabe and his chums stuffing ballot boxes in Zimbabwe.

eroblem 2: What does it mean for our representatives to represent us? Time and time again (Poll Tax, Iraq, Top-Up fees) government backbenchers fall into line and vote through proposals that have been opposed by a clear majority of the public. With their future careers in the hands of the party bosses, there is no incentive for MPs to break ranks and vote their conscience or side with the people when there is a clear divide between the public and the government. Very few people know who their MPs are and even fewer know how they vote, so nothing is gained by taking a principled stand on an issue. Edmund Burke was (mostly) right when he said: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion”; being representative does not neccessarily mean MPs should always go along with the public, but exercising their own judgement should mean exercising their own judgement, not following the party line on each and every vote. Defenders of the current system have twisted Burke’s original meaning to suit their own purposes.

Problem 3: Who these people are, as well as what they think and how they vote is important. This doesn’t mean that we should positively discriminate left, right and centre to make 50% of MPs female and 8% non-white (white male MPs aren’t inherently unable to represent their female or black constituents). What I’m referring to here is the worrying rise of a new political class which monopolizes all the leading power centres in the British political system. In the 18th century and before, the upper classes dominated politics to the exclusion of everyone else. The new political class might be different in that they might come from a variety of class backgrounds, but our government and Parliament are now dominated by career politicians who spend their whole careers (from university onwards) in professional politics. This is really no better than politics being dominateed by an economic elite. I’m not subscribing to the view that they’re all selfish, corrupt, power-hungry bastards (though quite a few of them are), but they simply cannot be representative of the people if they spend their entire life cossetted within a party, and in the Westminister bubble, without living the lives of the people they are elected to represent. In times gone by, almost all MPs would have decades-long careers as bankers, teachers, academics, trade unionists, and so on, before entering politics.

Problem 4: If representatives are supposed to govern as representatives of the will of the people, how can they possibly tell what the will of the people is? Happening to be hated by less than all the rest of the parties by less than a quarter of the people cannot be taken as a sign of approval for every half baked idea cobbled together in some dreary corner of Whitehall. Governments push through policies that were never included in their manifestos, and, even worse, which were specifically precluded in their promises to the electorate (“We will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them”; Labour manifesto, 2001). If ‘a week is a long time in politics’, then 4 or 5 years certainly is. In 2009, the government is still claiming to be representing the will of the people as (dubiously) expressed in 2005. So much has happened in between, and governments should not be able to claim legitimacy when the public has long since lost faith in them.

Not only has representative democracy not been particularly democratic, it was never meant to be. The USA is held up as the classic model of liberal representative democracy, but the US constitution was written as an explicitly anti-democratic document which sought to take power away from the popularly elected legislatures. The founding fathers would have been horrified had they been referred to as democrats, and the image of them as ‘the inventors of democracy’ has been counterfactually imposed on them as the years have gone by. Policies are important - they have real impacts on real people, but the way in which policies are decided, the workings of our (I hesitate to say democracy) system is just important as what comes out at the end. Britain is not a dictatorship-the government (mostly) respects freedoms-but neither is it a democracy, and the sooner we recognise that, the sooner we can do something about it.

Grow some balls, Tories

2009-12-18T15:22:00.001-08:00

With Matthew Horrocks
Published in TCS; 9th October 2008

The past 15 years of British politics have been marked by a political consensus that echoes that much debated ‘post-war consensus’ of over half a century ago. Both parties generally agree on almost all the fundamentals. The Conservatives now agree with New Labouron most social issues, and have committed themselves to spending similar amounts on public services. Issues such as abortion law and gay rights are decided more by the ethical convictions of individual MPs than the party line. Politicians may strut around with different coloured rosettes, but any semblance of genuine political conflict has long since been lost.

Time after time, Cameron has saved Blair and Brown when Labour backbenchers might otherwise have caused a government defeat. There are, however, two ways in which they go about affecting this consensus. In the first instance, agreement on matters of social and economic policy comes about due to the convergence of both parties on the centre. Labour has occupied this ground since 1994. For many members of the Conservative Party elected since 1997, New Labour’s policies are acceptable positions and the ones that their constituents would want them to pursue. We are a centrist nation and one cannot fault the Tory MPs for voting with the Government when they agree. This has been evident in the debate over top-up fees. It is an entirely respectable right-wing position to support students paying for their university education out of their future wages. That they voted with the Government and therefore saved it from defeat at the hands of Labour rebels is not their fault. So far, so commendable.

However, it is over more important matters that the Conservative party reveals its cowardice. In times of national urgency, the Tories have too often elected to trust in the Government rather than challenge it. Their leaders have fallen over themselves in their desire to look bipartisan and statesmanlike. The Tories do this to foster the impression that they have the national interest at heart, but more often than not they end up doing themselves more harm than good. In the aftermath of 9/11, they took the Labour government at its word and happily supported the decision to go to war in Iraq. The Tories were quite content to criticise it after the event, but wouldn’t stand up to the Government when it mattered, when it would have made a difference. Iain Duncan Smith has since said that his party would not have supported the war had it known what is known now. However, this attempt to gain political traction with the benefit of hindsight speaks more to their attempts to curry favour with a jaded electorate than to their concern for the national interst. Only the Liberal Democrats had the balls to stand up to the government and expose the war for the disaster that it was always going to be, and was.

Both parties never shut up about how much they want to have ‘a national debate’ over key issues, but HM Opposition frequently shirks its duty to scrutinise government policy in order to win a few extra Brownie points for appearing to be the nice guys. At the time of the vote on the Iraq war, the Conservatives were languishing in the polls and were convinced by a misleading dossier that support for military action was merited. Their mistake is justifiable. When they agreed, without significant debate, to allow the nationalisation of Nortern Rock, they were again down in the public’s estimation. This is no longer the case. Cameron has recently pledged to support the Government’s proposed rescue of the national banking system. We do not seek to oppose the rescue here, as it appears to be a neceassary step to save our small corner of the financial world. What one must take issue with though, is the Tories’ easy acquiesence. The public cannot tell whether or not the Government’s proposal is sound until it has received a thorough going over in the highest deliberative body in the land. Far from being in the national interest, it is frankly irresponsible of the oposition not to question, probe and tweak the proposed legislation. The stakes could not have been higher when Republicans and some Democrats voted down the first Bail-out package last week. The world was watching, but they didn’t allow themselves to be pressured into making a snap decision. They knew that debate is essential and good. They forced it back to the drawing-board and the bill, now passed, seems to be a better one for the American people. The Conservatives must do the same.

After a very long break....

2009-12-18T14:26:00.000-08:00

Thought it was about time to start doing my blog again, as I don't seem to have posted anything for a year or so. I've been writing quite alot for TCS, VIVID and The Student, but not got round to putting them on the blog. So, the next 10 to 15 posts will be old articles, and I'll start blogging regularly again in the new year.

Sarah Palin; WTF, not VPILF

2008-09-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was going to write an article savaging Sarah Palin, but its all been said before; and the first 1 and half minutes of this video says it very succintly, and very very well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64vYxdLceQ

Biden, and the Democratic Convention: One step forward, One step back for Obama

2008-08-31T16:11:00.000-07:00

Image: Copy and pasted from The Observer

It’s been a very good week indeed for the distinguished gentleman from Illinois. Slipping in the polls behind McCain for the first time after the Georgian crisis raised questions about his ability to handle foreign crises, he started convention week needing the VP announcement and the convention to pass off perfectly. And they did.

Biden is a very good choice. Of the three favourites; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman from Delaware, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, and Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, Biden was the obvious choice. Kaine was far too inexperienced and not well known, Bayh was too boring and would not have done anything except look pretty and cynically brought Indiana a few points closer. Biden papers over the vast foreign policy holes in Obama’s resume, and brings over 30 years of experiences. Yes, he’s a Washington insider, but I don’t think this undermines the change message, as many commentators argue. The fresh-faced kid from Chicago is still top of the ticket, and if Obama wins, the momentum from his victory would likely be too much for Biden to block reforms, even if he wanted to.

He does for Obama what Johnson did for Kennedy in 1960; stands in the background looking solid, dependable, experienced, fatherly; there just in case. It turned out that he was needed, and Johnson went on to be a great President in his own right. The bottom line is that the person chosen to be Vice President must also be qualified to be President, and Biden definitely is*.

The choice of Biden says some important things about Obama. He’s aware of his limitations and weaknesses and ready to admit them; and is willing to work with his critics. Biden scored quite a few points off Obama during the primary debates, heavily criticising him for his lack of experience, arguing that the Presidency was not the place for “on the job training”. With a vanishing poll lead, Obama must have felt the temptation to guarantee the Electoral College votes of a usually Republican state (only one large, or 2 small would be enough to win him the Presidency if he won all the states Kerry won in 2004), yet he went for a Senator from Delaware; a tiny state that never fails to go blue. Obama clearly was more concerned about getting a good running mate who would a capable VP or President than cynically trying to buy bonus Electoral College votes.

All this said, the way he dealt with Hillary was some cause for concern. He said that she was on the short list for VP, but CNN reported this week that she was never vetted for the position. Obama did not discuss it with her, nor did an Obama representative sound her out about it. She did, after all, win 18 million votes; and more primary votes than Obama: The least he could have done was put his campaign manager on a plane to New York. She was a serious candidate for the position and should have been treated as such. Obama has spoken glowingly about her in public, and it was a huge error not to have taken her more seriously as a running mate. However much I like him, it makes me wonder what else he preaches in public, but does not practice in private.

Obama’s speech was the clear highlight of the convention, but Hillary’s actions really brought everything together and made it the almost total success that it was. Her speech and dramatic intervention during the roll-call made great TV and I think went some way to healing the divisions wrought during the primaries. Here, again, though, there’s some more cause for concern. For me, the Convention went a bit too far; the nomination by acclamation was great to watch, but seemed too much like a huge artificial love-in. Much has been made of the Greek-column backdrop to his acceptance speech: The FT’s Clive Crook ranted “Who in the world thought that the Greek temple stage-set was right? If the designer’s brief had been ‘low-budget hubris’, it worked; by any other standard it was a calamity”. It’s disingenuous in the extreme to claim that a few chunks of painted polystyrene shows that Obama is too full of himself and his campaign is hubristic (for me, the mock Presidential seal was far worse), but it does make clear that he needs to manage his campaign’s reception and seek to put the brakes on it a bit more. It is brilliant that millions more people are throwing off their apathy and getting behind Obama, but the campaign (and it is the movement generally, and not the candidate himself) is starting to come off as arrogant and self-obsessed. He needs to find a way of injecting his own humility and groundedness into his campaign.

The Democrats have a lock on the change issue and are winning most of the policy arguments. It would be a shame that uneccessary mistakes like these, in the close race which it will continue to be, sow doubt in the minds of undecided voters and hand victory to McCain.

*The same can’t be said for McCain’s running mate, to be discussed in another post soon

EmoNation: What the credit crunch gloom says about us

2008-07-07T05:36:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me will probably call this post an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black. I'm not, its true, the cheeriest person; but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the glum mood gripping the country. Every news programme I watch or newspaper I read in the morning has story after story about Britain's sinking economy and the 'credit crunch': Inflation is up, employment and prices are up, spending, consumer confidence and the housing market down. Household budgets are tighter, bills are higher, we perhaps can't afford as many luxuries as we have been able to in recent years. But the fact that this is depressing the country says some important things about the modern outlook on life.

Most obviously, it shows the exaggerated importance modern society places in material goods and the extent to which derive happiness from them. If we make having the latest MP3 player or TV the thing we strive for, then of course we will end up becoming depressed and gloomy when economic prosperity wanes. However, there need not be a link between prosperity and happiness. A study of 65 cocuntries places impoverished Nigeria at the top of the 'world's happiest countries' list (followed closely by Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Pueto Rico), none of which are particularly prosperous, all of which have weaker economies and worse public services than less happy rich western countries. The closer family ties and stronger local communities might point a better and more secure path to happiness. We need to re-adjust our priorities; if we take pride in the fact that we live in beautiful country, that we have freedom of speech and expression, and many others things that we enjoy (while many countries do not) but that we don't really appreciate, then perhaps we can find a way of being happy that is less dependent on temporary economic prosperity.

The prices of basic commodities have increased significantly world-wide over the past year. In this country, it means that bread, milk and other basic foods are somewhat more expensive, and our supermarket bills are higher. Its an inconvenience, yes. We might have to buy the mankier beans and the cheapo orange juice. But its not going to kill us. The same, however, can't be said for hundreds of millions of people in poorer regions of the world. They might be on 40p day (compared to say, £50 a day here), and be spending at least 50% of their income on food (here, the average is 7%-15%). The World Bank says that more than 100m people could be plunged back underneath the poverty line and that millions might have to go days witout food. Irksome for us, lethal for them. The credit crunch gloom underlines the basic, ever-prevelant selfishness in our society, and an ignorance of how bad the situation is in some parts of the world. It might no longer be true that we've never had it so good, but hundreds of millions have never had it worse. If we open our eyes to the plight of others, and make of an effort to help them, then we might feel that bit better about our own situation.

Practically, also, is it not the case that being gloomy just makes things worse? I'm not much of an economist, but surely the strength of an economy rests to an important extent on consumer confidence? So, if we think the economy is bad and will get worse (meaning that we spend less), it will. If we had some blind faith and hope, perhaps things might improve.

The economy is less boyuant, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean that we should be. If we focused less on material goods, and thought more about the considerably worse situation of many hundreds of millions of the world's poor and helped them more, then we might be able to smile our way through the credit crunch.

The MPs' Expenses Row: Some Thoughts

2008-07-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

Image: Nicked from BBC

MP bashing is always a popular pursuit amongst the press and the public. At times, they can be overly unfair, tarring all 646 with the same brush: It is all too easily forgotten that there are a large number of Members who work hard, and very long hours, earning every penny of their £61820 salary.

That said, the current furore over MPs' expenses is long overdue. Expenses incurred through, for example, travel to and from constituencies is rightly re-imbursed. Money paid to MPs to purchase and decorate second homes is the main source of conflict, with the now infamous 'John Lewis List' at the centre of attention.

MPs do need two residences: They are required to live in their constituencies and so will usually have a house there (and rightly so), but also need a London residence while working in Parliament. It is therefore fair to help them maintain a flat in London. The considerable total amount of expense payments granted, and the lax way the system is policed are the most pressing problems, not the principle itself. MPs can spend up to £23 000 per year on furnishing and maintaining their second residence. Read that again: Per year. So, over the course of a year parliamentary term, an MP can claim £115 000 in this way.

Democracy means that the people rule themselves: They choose from among themselves a group of their fellow citizens a group of representatives who form the legislature and the executive. The expenses row highlights one of the most serious flaws in our democratic system: That we are not ruled by ourselves, but by a political class locked away from the people in the Westminister bubble who live lives far removed from the people they are supposed to represent.

The average family certainly does not spend £23 000 a year on maintaining their home, and so neither should their representatives. A simple solution to the problem, in addition to policing the system more rigorously, would be to restrict MPs home expenses to a national average. So, if the average family spends £6000 decorating and furnishing their homes, then this is what MPs should be limited to. This is not a magic solution, it might not even be much of a solution at all; but it would go some way to breaking down the barries that have always existed between the people and their representatives.

A quick word about pay: £60 000 is probably a fair amount if an MP works hard. They work very long hours, and work weekends in the constiuency. However, introducing performance related pay might help tax payers get more value for money. There could be a flat rate of, say, £40 000, which then could be topped up to £60 000 with bonuses, if they are deemed to be performing well. An independent comission could look at hospital waiting times, school results, and other measures and increase or reduce the bonuses accordingly. It goes without saying that pay should only increase in line with the national average.

MPs have at least accepted a propsal that they should no longer decide on their own pay. A business which let its employees decide on their own pay would never make a profit. This comparison sheds light on the shoddy way the mother of all Parliaments is run.

Enough said.

Here it goes....again

2008-06-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

I doubt anyone will read this, but in case someone is, welcome to my blog. Its actually my third attempt at blogging. My first two are floating around in some forgotten corner of the web. I usually post two or three times and then give up and forget about it, but I hope to have better luck with this one. My first post (written today) is at the very bottom of the page. Following that are two articles I've written recently(ish) for TCS which I thought might be of interest. Feel free to comment on any of my posts.

Two Faced Democracy

2008-06-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Picture: Mary Bjorkgeren

Published in The Cambridge Student on 21st February 2008.

School shootings are becoming increasingly prevalent across the US: The murder of six students at Northern Illinois University on Friday followed the deaths of more than 30 people at Virginia Tech University last year, and a further 320 deaths since 1992. In 2005 an estimated 3000 people died from gunshot wounds.

Yet US politicians, even moderates like John McCain, seem unwilling to do anything about it. A relatively small number of gun fanatics use the antiquated second amendment to sink plans which would save thousands of lives. The bill of rights, which enshrines some of the fundamental liberties we cherish today, such as the right to freedom of speech, religion and assembly, is also used to guarantee the basic and inalienable right of citizens to hunt with armour-piercing bullets (I was woefully unaware that deer have a layer of Kevlar under their skin, meaning that normal bullets simply won’t suffice).

Such is the tragic ambivalence of American Democracy.

The Presidential elections are another case in point. Candidates who may in a few months time be in charge of the world’s most devastating nuclear arsenal and sit behind the most powerful desk on the planet, have to first trek through the tiny backwater hamlets of Iowa and New Hampshire, and meet practically every voter individually in order to have any hope of winning. This gloriously pure form of democracy is woefully lacking in our own country. In the primaries, voter turnout has been smashing records and polling stations have started to run out of ballot papers.

On the other hand, the size of the country makes campaigns extremely expensive; it is no coincidence that most modern presidential contenders have been millionaires. Once in office, big business and other special interest groups have a tremendous hold over the resident and can so take the opportunity to exact policy concessions which are not in the interests of the nation. Bush rode into the White House on a wave of oil and big business money, and concomitant clouds of pollution spew forth.

In the disputed 2000 election, five members of the Supreme Court overruled the 51,003,926 people who chose the rightful winner, Al Gore. Yet in the 1950s and 60s, five unelected elderly white men struck huge blows for racial equality, desegregating schools and transport and guaranteeing voting rights and making more progress in 10 years than had been made in the previous 150. The same body which helped Bush steal that election has also been America’s most progressive institution, helping to secure rights for not only black people, but women, gays and the disabled, when progress in the elected branches of government stalled.

The Constitution and The Federalist Papers (the collection of arguments which were written advocating its adoption) are immortal classics of political philosophy. 200 years later, there is no better articulation of the value of democracy, and modern political scientists have yet to come up with a superior way of protecting it from tyranny than did the Founding Fathers.
Having said that, the very same constitution also values a “negro’”as two thirds of a white man and produces elections in which almost everyone gets re-elected (in the 2000 elections to the House of Representatives, 98% of sitting members were returned to Capitol Hill).

And, of course, there’s the fact that the country which was founded on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” spent $439.3 billion on its military last year, but left 37 million people in poverty and 47 million without healthcare.

A brief overview of history reveals the same pattern: America started off life as a small group of colonies huddled together on the edge of the known world, standing, despite the odds, against the tyranny of monarchy, insisting on their right to basic freedoms. Two hundred years later it puts the whole world in peril by refusing to agree to international pollution standards, has propped-up numerous dictatorships and helped topple elected governments, but also serves as an inspiration for those wishing for a better life.

America is not the glittering utopian democracy its politicians portray it to be, but just as inaccurate is the picture of the monolithic, destructive evil of its critics. US politics is, in various ways, both a disgusting sham and a shining light, both an example to aspire to and to avoid at all costs.

Three Cheers for Two Jags

2008-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Picture: Dan Strange

Published in The Cambridge Student on 24th April 2008.

"Whenever I go to Mr Chu’s in Hull, my favourite Chinese restaurant in the whole world . . . I could eat my way through the entire menu”, “I could sup a whole tin of Carnation condensed milk, just for the taste”.

Yes, we all had a bit of a laugh at the quotes filling the Sunday pages when John Prescott went public with his long-running fight with, amongst other things, bulimia. Throughout his 40-year career in politics he has been the butt of jokes about his weight and aggressive political style, providing an endless stream of material for satirical programmes like Have I Got News For You? and Bremner, Bird and Fortune.

He’s been pilloried in the press for the scuffle with a protester during the 2001 election, an affair with his secretary, the infamous croquet match and his long residence (at the taxpayer’s expense) at the opulent Dorneywood estate. And who could forget his shaky command of the English language, which gave us such gems as “The green belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it,” and “It’s great to be back on terra cotta”?

Admittedly, not exactly a blemish free political career, but in more ways than you think, he has contributed a great deal to the country in his time in office.

The decision to reveal his bulimia should be applauded. Its obviously something he has struggled with for many years, and it must have taken some guts (pun not intended), even for the usually forthright former Deputy PM to tell the world about it. Most people consider it to be a problem which afflicts only young women, and his decision will encourage other men who would otherwise have been too embarrassed to talk about it to seek help.

His willingness to venture onto ground other politicians would never dare to tread, admitting to having a problem like bulimia and hitting back when he was attacked, helped show us that politicians are real people, and, as the Tories’ Iain Dale has said, helped dispel the notion that politicians are “supremely confident and outgoing people who wouldn’t recognise shyness and self doubt if they hit them in the face”. In being flawed, and admitting it, he provides a human, if ever so slightly alarming, face for British politics.

And at least John Prescott is interesting. In a political world filled with personality-less Ed Millibands and Jacqui Smiths, he is refreshingly off-message and uncompromising. An ardent trade unionist, he’s a relic from a prior political age, when politics was an exciting battle of opposing ideas.

The sad death of backbench battleaxe Gwyneth Dunwoody, and the imminent retirement of Anne Widdecombe and the 'Beast of Bolsover' Dennis Skinner signals the death of that kind of politics. He was more competent in government than his critics make out: In his early appointment in charge of transport, he concluded some difficult and complicated negotiations over the railways and the Channel Tunnel, for example.

During his ten years as number two to Tony Blair, he helped mediate the long-running dispute between the former and current Prime Ministers, and acted as a bridge between the socialist grassroots of the party and its New Labour leadership.

He was chosen as Deputy PM for a reason; to bridge the two parts of the party and to give the government a common touch. He’s done all that, and given us a few laughs along the way. What else could we have asked for?

Why Clinton should be on the ticket

2008-06-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Democratic Presidential contest finishes today with Montana and South Dakota*; Obama will win both comfortably, but will fall just short of the magic number. A flood (or even a trickle would suffice) of super delegates will put Obama over the top by Thursday at the latest; Clinton (finally) will drop out. The biggest mistake Obama could make then, though, would be not to choose Hillary as his running mate.

She has a huge mandate to be chosen to run for the Vice Presidency: The press have presented the race as a fairly comfortable ride for Obama, with Clinton never quite catching up ever since Iowa. This is just plain wrong; whichever way you cut the figures, she's run Obama extremely close:

a) Popular Vote
i) Standard popular vote (not including some caucus states which do not release voting numbers) Obama: 17,389,253, Clinton:17,364,667.

ii) Counting estimates of these, but not counting Obama's share of 'Uncommitted' votes in Michigan: Clinton: 17,916,763, Obama: 17,723,200

iii) Counting an estimated Obama share of 'Uncommitted' Michigan votes: Obama: 17,961,505 (48.8%), Clinton:17,916,838 (48.7%)

iv) Excluding Michigan: Obama: 17,267,658, Clinton: 17,101,472

b) Delegate Vote

i) Committed delegates only: Obama: 1741 (51.5%), Clinton: 1624 (48.07%)

ii) Committed and Super: Obama: 2076 (51.8%), Clinton: 1917 (47.8%)

With as little as 0.1% between the candidates, Hillary more than deserves a place on the ticket.
Obama also needs to bear in mind that huge numbers of Clinton supporters (as many as 40%) have threatened to vote for McCain in Novermber if Clinton isn't the nominee. Even if we assume that most of these won't carry through their threat, its still a problem: If just 10% (1.7m) voted for McCain, it could cost Obama the election (the popular vote difference was only 2m in 2004, and 500 000 in 2000).

Obama has a problem with hispanics and poorer, rural, white voters. Both of these groups have voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in these primaries, and also for Bush in 2000 and 2004. If Obama isn't able to secure them, they'll go Republican again in 2008. No other potential VP candidate could help him with both of these groups. Richardson (Governor of New Mexico) would help with Hispanics, and Sibelius (Governor of Kansas) could help deliver rural votes, and populist Edwards would help win support from poorer voters, but he has ruled himself out.

McCain has gained steam up north in disgruntled industrial states like Michigan and Minnesota. Only Clinton can keep these states safe while also opening up opportunities elsewhere like Arkansas and Florida.

Go to the excellent 270towin.com**: The beige states are swing states. A Clinton Vice Presidency would nudge Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and New Jersey into the Democratic column, if they're not there already. It would also put Arkansas (she was its First Lady) in play. Florida might also be made an easier target for the Democrats; she won there, and it has a significant Hispanic population. Even if Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina and Iowa didn't go blue, and New Hampshire went for McCain, Obama-Clinton would still win comfortably (with about 290 electoral college votes).

The Republicans are well aware of this. CNN reports that former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has sent an e-mail entitled "Democrats Win Landslide Victory" to his colleagues. In this, he outlines his fears for November: "I have a real fear of waking up to this headline after the elections this fall", he writes, "In key states, news accounts indicate Democrats are outpacing Republicans registering voters. We also know Barack Obama's campaign is utilizing the Internet to raise record amounts of money to support his campaign and Democrats nationally...all in the hope that new voters and record resources will produce a Democrat landslide victory this fall...There's so much at risk, and conservatives I talk with from all across the country are feeling the rumblings of 'what could be'…"

I don't really buy the 'too much history on the ticket' argument. Those voters put off by a woman being the Vice Presidential candidate will almost certainly have already been put off by the notion of an African American as President. There are certainly problems: HRC has made some pretty disparaging comments about Obama that she will struggle to walk back. Bill, who's already done enough damage, will need to be kept very firmly out of the spotlight. But I think these are all off-set by the disaster that will ensue if Clinton is left off the ticket already, as bitter Clinton supporters, hardened by months of campaigning and having their hopes liften up, to be then dashed, flood to McCain.

The Obama campaign also seems to be warming (if only just) to the idea: She is officially on the short list, and Obama told reporters in Michigan that in a call to Mrs Clinton following her weekend win in Puerto Rico's primary, he congratulated her on running "an extraordinary race". He also said that he "told her that once the dust settled [he was] looking forward to meeting with her at a time and place of her choosing", adding "The sooner we can bring the party together, the better, so we can focus on John McCain and taking back the White House".

Having Hillary on the ticket will not be an easy decision, and it will create problems for Obama, but it is the only way to turn a possible Democratic victory in November into a probable one.

____________________________________
*I was wrong: Clinton won South Dakota 54%:43%
** http://www.270towin.com/2008_polls/mccain_obama/