World Tonight

In my new role as critic of the modern media (err, I like you all really, honest!) and my old (minor, supporting) role as New Labour acolyte, I was invited on to Radio 4s World Tonight, last, err, night. We talked about the Chilcot Enquiry.

Apparently, you will soon be able to listen here, should you so wish.

I did think it somewhat amusing that the three participants to the discussion were Ritula Shah, Afua Hirsch and Hopi Sen. All of us with posh southern accents. Even though I’m neither, and I’ve no idea about Ms Shah and Ms Hirsch.

Pet hates in reporting

(inspired by CS Clark’s comment on previous post)

A proclamation to journalists: If you find yourself using any of the following phrases and reporting techniques, you are guilty of degrading the public discourse and will pay the price, come the revolution.*

1. “Will say later today” : If someone is going to say something, wait until they’ve said it. If they haven’t said it yet, cover something that someone has said. Do otherwise and we allow people to replace “Things that have happened” with “things we want you to know will happen”. We all try to do this, and you shouldn’t let us. Gimps.

2.”according to a new report” : You know what reports are? They’re somebody writing down what they think about stuff. What someone thinks about stuff isn’t news. It’s just what someone thinks.

Usually, the people who think these things have an agenda, otherwise they wouldn’t go to the length of writing a report. Clue: If there’s a fact in the report, then it’s the fact that’s interesting, and it should stand on its own merits. If you have to qualify it by saying “ooh not me guv, these blokes say it” – it’s junk. If you don’t know whether the fact stands up – you’re not doing your job.

3. “A poll of our viewers….” : Look. Your viewers are a tiny proportion of the populace. The segment who phone into polls are an even tinier proportion of that. Nobody cares what they think becuase they’re not representative. People who phone into news shows do not represent a sample of anything. Even you don’t care what they think. Because let’s face it, you hate the sort of people who phone into meaningless polls. You harbour a secret contempt for them. I can read it in your eyes. So stop. Now.

4. Columnists: Any anecdote about your personal life that you believe has wider significance. It really doesn’t.

Also, you’re bound to sound like a right twunt. Whether it’s problems in finding au pairs, your latest diet, what driving a 4×4 says about you or how much you like the football, your tastes and preferences are shared by a tiny proportion of the population .The rest will think you’re a berk.

If you’re lucky, the tiny segment will worship you like a god. But then you’re not telling people things, you’re channeling impotent rage through your word processor. Which is a great job, but not news.

Feel free to add your own hates.

*This particular revolution is very finely planned. It involves merely the establishment of one H. Sen as arbiter of all things, and in charge of everything. This awesome power is safe in my hands, as I really can’t be bothered to be proper totalitarian. All that administering prison camps sounds like a lot of hard work. Just keep me in reasonable luxury, give me broadband and a palace, and let me jail the odd minor celebrity for being annoying, and I’ll be happy. Just don’t ask me to go round opening things.

On being nasty…

So David Cameron is to launch a highly personal attack on Gordon Brown over expenses.

Aside from the obvious point (that I think Cameron’s wrong) I have three problems with this, from a political strategy and tactics point of view.

First, It undermines David Cameron’s carefully constructed “nice” image. Cameron sometimes does this at PMQs and it makes him look sneering -and sometimes even braying. That’s OK in PMQs, but doesn’t work on its own. Cameron is supposed to be about a new politics. This feels like the same old mud wrestling.

Second, It comes after a relatively bad couple of weeks for the Tories, so this looks more like lashing out than considered assault. A personal attack also allows Labour to respond with high-minded disgust, and given that no party emerges well from expenses, it’s dodgy ground to fight on.

Finally, the general rule is for the leader to set out the positive vision, and for someone else to do the man marking. It’s like the difference between a centre forward and a centre back*. Why not let Grieve, or Osborne, or Grayling do the crunching tackle, then let Cameron run up the field with the ball? Doesn’t he trust them to get the job done?

Anyway, I don’t think this area is a profitable one for partisan attack anyway. The whole point about the perception of modern politics is that “they’re all in it for themselves”. Trying to use the scandal for party advantage, when so many of each party are implicated re-enforces that message. Far better to try to be high-minded.

In that sense, Nick Clegg is probably getting the tone, if not the policy right (and Harriet Harman did pretty well on the Today programme too)

* I should say that this is rather different from the sort of briefing that comprised l’affair McBride (and lots of other stuff from all sides that we don’t know about). That’s more like a pitch invasion, and much further from the way to play the game.

The vicious and corrupt politicians… of Rome.

Since we are about to be treated to any number of essays about the terrible decline in the standing of politics, I should at least mention some examples of the machinations, corruption and general degeneracy of the titans of the political past.

Men are not perfect, politicians even less so, and when given the opportunity to abuse rank and privilege, some will take it. The challenge is to prevent the opportunity, not pretend that this era is any more morally corrupt than any other.

Today was going to be “Disraeli was a bankrupt who went into parliament to avoid debtors gaol” day, but then I thought I should start further back.

So here’s some advice given by Quintus Cicero to his elder brother, as the latter prepared to campaign for the Consulship of Rome in 63BC

“Take care that your whole candidature is full of éclat, brilliant, splendid, suited to the popular taste, presenting a spectacle of the utmost dignity and magnificence.

See also, if possible, that some new scandal is started against your competitors for crime or looseness of life or corruption, such as is in harmony with their characters.”

Outrageous stuff.

There’s more too – about bribery. Cicero was fighting far wealthier candidates, so his advising brother suggested how to deal with the power of their bribes. In a nutshell – he suggests scaring the bejesus out of the corrupt.

“if we allot to men of influence and zeal in our service their several tasks; if we put before our rivals the threat of legal proceedings ; if we inspire their agents with fear, and by some means check the distributors, it is possible to secure either that there shall be no bribery or that it shall be ineffectual”

In the end, Cicero did a deal with some of the richest men in Rome, so perhaps he didn’t need to worry overmuch about bribery.

It’s all part of a wonderful guide to election campaigning written by Cicero’s brother. Despite the two thousand year gap, it contains lots of advice applicable to parliamentary candidates today – for example, what candidate for selection wouldn’t learn something from this advice:

“I can assure you of this, that there is no one unless he happens to be bound by some special tie to some one of your rivals, whom you could not induce, if you took pains, to earn your affection by his good services, and to seize the opportunity of putting you under an obligation–let him fully understand that you value him highly, that you really mean what you say, that he is making a good investment, and that there will accrue from it not only a brief and electioneering friendship, but a firm and lasting one.”

However, I have a horrible feeling that if I were in classical Rome, I’d be some patrician’s nomenclator. Employed to whisper the names of voters into the ear of the ambitious competitor for office. How little thingss change.

Srs bizns: What you should be afraid of…

While the political media is (understandably enough) focused on “Expenses Wars: Episode Six – Charge of the Wrongdoers”, I suggest that it’s worth taking a few minutes out from our busy schedule of hurling rotten fruit at errant knaves to read Giles Wilkes post on what we should and shouldn’t be afraid of in the economy.

In an unusual step, I’ve removed some points about the Loyal Opposition from Giles’s quote. I don’t want to be accused of mere partisanship on this. (Actually, I want to be hyper-partisan, but also to stop people from being able to criticise me for it. I’m cute like that.)

Two big things to be scared of – First, the impact of the fiscal tightening we’re about to undergo on demand.

“The government is going from adding 23 billion of demand to the economy, to taking some out (in the next fiscal – HS). If that 23bn is not replaced in terms of demand by the private sector in some way, then we get a second dip into recession. In which case, scrap all these projections, add several negative percentages to them… …there is a real risk that weak sterling will not lead to exporters rebuilding output – just margins…

The already steep fiscal retrenchment – no other country is already doing this …wrong to argue for even steeper earlier cuts. The NIESR…. clearly agree:

“There is no reason for tightening fiscal policy now. People are worrying about long-term debt problems when they should be worried about short-term output problems.”

This is scary, but the real Big Bad Giles warns us of (Shout out to the Buffy fans!) is the chance we’ve permanently (permanently here meaning “for a long while”) hobbled our growth potential. I worry about this too – though my worry is less that it’s a permanent hobbling, but that the collapse in investment, and particularly by investment in industry is a state of self shackling that everyone connives in.

For me, one of the big things government should be doing to counter that is developing policy measures to encourage putting capital to work in the UK, like helping companies build factories, or research labs, or aircraft carriers or schools and houses. If we’re facing a tight fiscal situation, this becomes a big question of priorities.

I’d feel much more comfortable with people talking about austerity in the public services, if the reason for such austerity was that we were using taxes to encourage capital investment, rather than just “tightening our belts” because of a coming debt crisis that may never materialise.

More Expenses

Having had a fairly busy day, I’ve not been able to keep track of the details of the release of MPs expenses today.

It’s telling though, that this story is being ranked above the decision to stop quantitative easing. Even after all the revelations we’ve heard, the behaviour of certain MPs is a bigger story than the economy.

That’s a judgement of how bad it is, not a complaint about the news agenda.

I argued a while back that the only way to deal with this scandal properly was by involving the police and a forensic panel to find out both who’d broken criminal law and who’d behaved inaprpropriately in public office.

While it looks like we may well be seeing charges for some people, If I’m honest, I don’t think Sir Thomas Legge’s approach achieved what was needed. Putting arbitrary limits on certain expenses, changing the rules on other expenses and so on, meant that people who had claimed £50 more than what Sir Thomas thought was fair for a cleaner were lumped in with people who had made thousands out of Mortgages.

The reviews missed some real problems with MPs expenses, including the fact that they made it perfectly legit to make a huge profit out of your second home, by claiming the maximum mortgage interest possible and keeping the capital gain for yourself.

As far as I can tell, someone who bought a house on an interest only mortgage, and sold it two years later, repeating at will, keeping the capital gain and using it to finance ever larger properties (or even using them as deposits to buy another house for a family member), would have been given a clean bill of health today. How is that right?

So I suspect some people who deserve to be the subject of voter anger will be quietly getting away with it, while others who did little wrong will be pilloried in their local paper.

Still, even if unfair, there’s no doubt that this process was needed.

Now the challenge or politicians of all parties is to show that they care more about household expenses than their own expenses.

Fleabag Monkeyface MP?

The latest edition of Private Eye carries an advert for a set of children’s books featuring a hero with the alluring moniker “Fleabag Monkeyface“.

Suitably for that august organ, Mr Monkeyface’s appearance and fruit based accoutrements somehow reminded me of someone else…

Miliband ---- Monkeyface

 Sorry David, I love you really.

Reviewing PMQs

I’ve agreed to join Paul Richards and Conor Ryan, both esteemed Labour bloggers (They were  special advisers, while I was just an ‘umble party staffer*), in reviewing each weeks PMQs over at Progress Online.

You can read our first effort here.  

No, I’m not telling you what we said. You have to go there to read it.

*This sounds like a modern take on a classic Music hall song

MyDavidCameron.com teaches us…

Clifford Singer, the man behind mydavidcameron.com, has five lessons for new media campaigning. All of them are worth a read, but his first point is the most telling.

“With a viral campaign concept is everything. It’s too easy to get caught up in the technology – how do we use this widget to connect to Facebook or Twitter – and to forget about the basics of having something that’s funny or useful or fascinating.”

Indeed. Concept is everything (as long as someone does the hard work of making the concept happen, and doing well, which is the part Clifford is all modest about).

On Mutualism…

A couple of correspondents have emailed to say that they don’t understand why I took agin mutualism in my post yesterday, They point out that Mutualism is vg, and I am inclined to agree.

However, if we’re to make that a basis of our manifesto, we have to be a lot cleaer about exactly what that will do for the user of services. Just being in favour of a different form of ownership is neither here nor there.

Take the Tory plans for free schools – those are always couched in terms of raising standards, freeing teachers and so on. If we are to make the case for mutualism, the core of that has to be about why it would make services better for people – not simply that we expand mutualism ’cause everyone knows mutualism is good, which seemed to be the tone of the briefing over the weekend.

Frankly, I don’t think people care much about structures, much as they don’t really care that much about schools being free or unfree, as long as they’re better*. Convince people that mutualism means better schools, and you’re on to something. Convince people you’ll expand mutualism in schools without that groundwork, and you appear to be doing little of use.

* That doesn’t mean political wonks shouldn’t care passionately about these issues – Structures do make a difference. Knowing how to cross that divide is the difference between policy and communication.