Aren't We Forgetting A Few People?

As the political world starts its rather leisurely return to school, thoughts in the devolved parts of the country return once again to the problems of multiple referendums and elections on the same day in May 2011. And as Betsan Powys raises the very good question as to which of the various polls will be counted first, I'd like to pose one of my own.

Why do we keep forgetting Northern Ireland?

It may have escaped our notice, but their devolved government has (perhaps most miraculously of all) survived its four years and will be due elections in May 2011 itself. What's more, thanks to the failure of their most recent attempt at local government reforms, there will also be local government elections the same day. So that's two STV elections with something approaching a million ballots to be dealt with as it is, plus the AV referendum on top...

Such forgetfulness is particularly unusual given how crucial Northern Ireland's votes could be in the overall shakeup. After all, this is a country whose political system wouldn't function without STV; there has to be a decent chance of a wide margin in favour of AV and if there is, it could be 2011's Carmarthenshire...

Notes From, Well, Quite A Big Island Actually...

So Richard Scudamore, the Chief Executive of the Premier League (not to be confused with Sir Dave Richards, the Chairman of the Premier League who Fulham are asking the High Court to fire for improper interference in transfers) says that the World Cup result is "partly" the Premier League's fault.

Which is fine (being at least the truth, if not necessarily the whole truth) except that he reinforced his argument by recourse to one of the great canards beloved of British sports pundits after another valiant or not-so-valiant failure; "We're only a small island, we have to be realistic."

Back in 2003, I remember the same pundits revelling in the fact that Yorkshire (a county not exactly united in its love of the game) had more registered rugby union players than the whole of Australia (a country almost five times the size). Indeed, this was meant to be one of the reasons why we would (and, of course, did) kick Aussie butt in the Rugby World Cup final (and yes, I am going to gratuitously link to the video...)

But football never considers those statistics, it just says "We're only a small country" and moves along without so much as a by your leave. Which if funny, because actually we're something like the 22nd most populous nation on Earth and what's more, six of the larger nations have never qualified for a World Cup and four of them have only ever qualified once.

When you go beyond the basic populations and look at the actual footballing statistics, the hypothesis becomes even more ludicrous. According to FIFA's most recent global study, we rank 7th for registered adult players and 6th for registered youth players, as well as having the 2nd highest number of professionals and the highest number of clubs.

If we really are such a small nation, how did Spain with 16m fewer people and 760k fewer players manage to win this time? Italy and France are about the same size as us, you tell me, how have they been doing in World Cups of late?

The problems in English (and, indeed, British) football are far deeper than being the fault of the Premier League institutionally; there is a fundamental cultural gap that I have no idea how to close. But suggesting that we shouldn't expect to be a substantial player in the global game is utterly disingenuous and the sooner we stop trying to excuse failure and start trying to ingrain success, the better.

Waste (17 Different Bits Of)

Well, the stack of spam comments from China to be moderated suggests that its about time I got back in the saddle, blogging wise. My normal intermittency notwithstanding, I hope you'll understand that sooner or later, a dissertation and seven exams in two weeks were going to get to me and necessitate a rest from anything other than my council duties.

One thing I have been reflecting on in my time away is column inches and how they affect council debates. Cardiff Council is pretty good as a debating chamber, with plenty of speakers on all sides who'll give the political theatre some gusto and occasionally cover the issues reasonably well too. What's more, with webcasting you can now watch them in their entirety (and we'll ignore the terrible vision I just had of the highlights programme, complete with Alan Hansen...)

Now of course no local paper could cover such debates in their entirety, but space pressures can do them a disservice. Last year, for example, we had a debate on a foundation school application at Whitchurch High School that did an outstanding job of covering the philosophical underpinnings of new state school governance arrangements; the local press coverage, however, amounted to one column inch about me using the word screw (and even then only in attribution, not against anyone...)

Back in June, meanwhile, we had the latest in our regular series of Conservative motions on composting, which led to a brief article and an exchange of letters wherein I accused the Tories of wilful ignorance and they accused me of a lack of logic. Much as we could have kept going back and forth in the letters page, however, I suspect it will accomplish more to put the whole of the argument on record. In doing so, however, I'm mindful that at the end of the debate, Conservative group leader, Cllr David Walker, helpfully read out the dictionary definition of hubris, an act some might argue is itself the dictionary definition of hubris (though pointing that out may also be the dictionary definition of hubris, and so on until the heat death of the universe...)

Either way, the basic problem for the Conservatives was a fundamental failing of the English language, namely its lack of a plural indefinite article. Proposing the motion, Cllr Rod McKerlich said that he would lay out “the” facts. Instead, he laid out a range of things that may have been facts, some, none or fewer of which may have been in any way relevant.

The act that Cllr Walker thinks was hubris was the introduction, in September 2008, of food waste collections for every household that made Cardiff the first UK city to accomplish a city-wide roll-out. As with most waste policy matters for councils up and down the country, there were three key drivers for food waste collections. On the practical front, Cardiff's landfill site at Lamby Way is almost full and while we are (as part of the Prosiect Gwyrdd alliance of local authorities) pursuing alternatives, anything that can extend the life of the existing facilities is enormously valuable. Economically, between UK landfill tax escalators and EU recycling fines there is a huge financial impetus to perform. And of course morally there is the minor matter of it all being fundamentally the right thing to do, particularly with food waste and its potent mix of methane and pathogens.

Of course, once you've decided to collect something, you need to work out how to collect it and what to do with it. The Conservatives first objection to our scheme is that, by collecting food waste together with garden waste, composting of the garden waste now costs money when previously it was essentially done for nothing. But the costs of what you do with it and the costs of how you collect it aren't independent in that way; if you collect the food waste separately, that means a whole additional set of collections, with more trucks and more staff, plus more complications for the householder.

The other objection, the one that the Conservatives seem to think is a matter of public scandal, is that at present the food waste, once collected, is sent for composting at a facility in Derby. Environmentally they seem to think that that's a no-brainer, but that's why I accused them of not using their brains. If you put the food waste in landfill, it will release copious amounts of methane, which is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide; any carbon dioxide emitted by transporting it to Derby therefore still represents a tremendous saving compared to the methane that would otherwise have been emitted. As for the cost, again it's quite simple; the alternative is putting the food waste into landfill and then getting fined for doing so.

Cllr Page in his letter seems to think his party were only asking why we don't have the facilities to do it ourselves. In fact, they were going one step beyond that, saying that because we didn't have the facilities, we shouldn't have started collecting food waste in the first place. Clearly that would have been financially and environmentally suicidal, and in any case, had they listened to a word that was said to them in the debate, they would have had their answer.

Capital funding for local authorities doesn't grow on trees, it is begrudgingly doled out by your higher authority of choice (in our case, the Welsh Assembly Government) and only if they absolutely agree with what you want to do with it. So if they decide to say, “You know those in-vessel composters we were telling you to build? Yeah, actually, don't do that, build anaerobic digesters instead...” the local authority in question has to sit there and take it.

That may not be convenient for an opposition party that wants everything to be the result of a gargantuan cock-up on the council's part, but it is a depressingly regular occurrence with WAG. So for the Tories, there is the age-old politician's choice; do you want to listen to the answer to your question, or do you want to claim that any answer that isn't the one you want is a lie? Sadly, on waste our Conservatives appear determined to take the latter option.

Becoming Laws Unto Themselves

And then the inevitable happened. When the coalition was formed, as a blogosphere we all wondered how we would react when the first scandal came; lo and behold, when it did it came with a big dollop of core liberal issues attached.

Then again, I guess the response to Friday night and Saturday morning, up to and including David's resignation, was just as inevitable given the collective political response to expenses from day one. Looking back, the occasional Margaret Moran joke notwithstanding, I never blogged on the topic. Normally that might be explained by my general attitude to any sort of topicality, but in this case it stemmed from my being just utterly sick of the immaturity and hypocrisy of it all.

What we got was the very worst kind of moral equivalence. Neither the Torygraph nor any of the politicians really tried to understand what had gone on; instead, the Torygraph intimated that all the politicians were evil and the politicians acquiesced on the grounds that at least their politicians were just as evil as the other side's. Making it all about the individuals, however, doesn't do anything to address either what did happen or what should happen.

In reality, the expenses scandals were many and several. The duck houses were amusing, yes, but the sense of moral outrage at them was entirely misplaced. Fundamentally, even if the voters are the interview panel and the employers of MPs, they can't be their HR or payroll department, hence there must be a Fees Office. Clearly there was a failing there in scrutiny terms (which the FOI requests went to the heart of) but any such failing is by definition systemic and can only be solved by changing the system, which hopefully we have.

The thing that's missing from that scenario, from the point of view of a law student at any rate, is culpability. Plenty of bloggers and commenters have screamed about how David Laws is meant to have defrauded the public, but the question they must answer is simple; how? Claiming for money you never spent is fraud (see the various examples that are currently sub judice.) Flipping is fraud (as you are by definition lying to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which tends to be a bad idea. And before you start, even the Torygraph admit that Danny Alexander did nothing illegal and nothing any member of the public could have done...)

But what is it exactly that David Laws did? Even if we ignore the fact that the rule in the Green Book is lorry-drivingly vague (and seriously, the phrase "treat each other as spouses" is the sort of thing that earns QCs serious hourly rates down on the Strand) we have to ask what that rule was there to prevent. If David had taken money for somewhere he hadn't lived (like, say, Baroness Uddin) there would be a clear fraud. If David's claimed rent had been excessive for the property, that would have been fraud. As it is, while it may generally be advisable not to be in the situation David was, it is difficult to see how it constitutes any sort of fraud.

At the same time, what it does show is how abysmally the Torygraph-led knee-jerk reaction has actually served the taxpayer's interest. Then again, the one thing the Torygraph was never smart enough to understand was what the taxpayer's interest was, or that it was two-fold; to get value for money, yes, but also to ensure the effectiveness of their MP. On the value side, it would appear that David's rent claim was positively modest. And as for effectiveness, if anyone imagines he would have been a more effective MP if forced to move out of the home he shared with his partner...

I think we can all understand and sympathise with why David chose to resign. But we should be clear as a party that he didn't have to. Instead, the last forty-eight hours taught us three things; that we have still done nothing like enough to ensure that everyone can live in our country without fear of discrimination, that we need to do far more to restore not only the integrity of representative democracy but the idea itself, and that despite managing to prevent a Tory majority we have not even started to reduce the power of unaccountable press barons whose interests are entirely hostile to those of the electorate.

Unite v Simpson And Woodley

As my exams draw to a close, I find myself pondering at least one court case. And I find myself wondering why, if you wanted a reason why the Labour coalition never happened, you would look any further than last week in the High Court.

Political parties have to have a fundamental idea around which they can coalesce. This would normally, of course, be an ideology, but it doesn't have to be; ideologies are generally better producers of narratives, but as UKIP have shown it is possible under the right circumstances to achieve a narrative without one.

Where this gets incredibly messy is that the idea has very little basis in fact. It is more than anything an article of faith; what matters is that you believe that your idea fits your party. The gravitational effects on the idea are of course considerable; the effects of time and personal loyalty pull peoples ideas around and together, while the occasional political earthquake highlights the differences in ideas in the same party and drives them apart.

The effect of time is most clearly seen in the Tories, who now have a real divide between their young, vaguely libertarian urbanites and an older, suburban, palaeoconservative core. To some extent this works because the younger group will grow into the older one, in others it functions because the ideology itself, while strong, continues to reassess itself.

It was that reinvention that sustained liberalism and thus the Lib Dems, albeit at the cost of its illegitimate offspring, libertarianism. Mind you, it has been the Lib Dems who have been most exposed to the earthquakes; social democracy in the 80's, the civil liberties agenda in the 00's...

But one of the standard pearls of political wisdom is that it's easier to oppose and it's here that the current political earthquake will damage us, if at all; for those for whom not-Tory, not-New Labour was their idea, the coalition may pose questions. But to define oneself as only against Blair is to misunderstand the other idea, or to fail to ask the pertinent question; what is the Labour Party's idea?

As a law student, I'd say that contractually the Labour Party is whatever the unions want it to be. Then again, in 1900 when those contracts were formed, there was a fairly clear ideological basis to the broader labour movement. But as socialism failed across the world, whether in its communist implementations abroad or its democratic ones at home, that ideological basis faded, eventually dying in the flames of Thatcherism and the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

If the idea was dead, however, what was to replace it? At the very least you needed something to blame that didn't involve the ideology having failed; admitting that is like saying Santa Claus isn't real, it shatters the illusion. In the end, five factors held the Labour Party together in its darkest hour. The cautionary tale of the SDP and the entrenchment of the two-party system in an old media world contributed, but I suppose the truth of the matter is that everything was overtaken by events.

After all, never has a government gone from victory to defeat quicker than John Major's. From the moment David Cameron walked out of the Treasury ten steps behind Norman Lamont, the Conservatives were doomed, though that didn't stop them piling on the self-inflicted wounds. Either way, you have to conclude that John Smith would have won in 1997.

But then, that's the great political what if, perhaps of all time. The questions are endless; how many seats would he have won? Would we now be calling it a Portillo moment? The variables are endless, and in any case it's difficult to see how radically different the policy would have been; Brown would still have been Chancellor, Blair would have been a key source of ideas in the Cabinet, Clause Four would have survived but it's not as if they'd have done anything about it...

Nevertheless, at that moment in the summer of 1994, the Labour Party was given a choice unlike that any party had perhaps ever faced; with victory assured, all it had to worry about was its idea and how best to express it. And what was the idea they chose?

Anything's better than the Tories.

It's instinctive to try and look for an ideological basis for New Labour, and God knows Blair tried with the Third Way. But by 1994, the unions (as the contractual partners in all this) were sufficiently shellshocked by the success of Thatcher's vitriol toward them and the failure of their reciprocal fury that it must have seemed almost trivial to say that anything was better than the Tories.

And so New Labour came to pass. For a foolhardy few it may have been a Munchausenian fantasy, a passionate belief in a non-existent ideology. But for most, whether jumped at with the fervour of a drowning man or begrudgingly accepted as necessary but irrelevant to one's own socialism, the only purpose it served was to beat the Tories.

It might not have mattered; just because the Labour Party was rallying around not-Tory didn't mean they had to express that idea in practice. But in a wonderfully synergistic confluence, the Labour Party got exactly what it deserved; the boy king Blair and his Somerset, Mandelson.

I've written before about how New Labour turned to quantum government, using spin (that quantumest of concepts) to justify not doing socialist things by showing how, by the political equivalent of the sum over histories, the things they did inched them towards a socialist ideal; that picture on the cover of the Labour manifesto was only inaccurate in that they put it at the start and not at the end.

In accepting that idea, however, New Labour, perhaps inadvertently, accepted its corollary; once you've established that anything's better than the Tories, it doesn't particularly matter how much better it is. That's not to say they needed to put so much effort into proving just how similar to the Tories they could be, of course...

Nevertheless, it is in that psychology that the impossibility of a Lib-Lab coalition was founded. Perhaps some part of the Labour hindbrain understood that the Lib Dems were the only practical non-Tory option in town, but it was overcome. On the one hand, by basing themselves on non-Toryness, Labour set themselves up as arbiters of what a non-Tory world looked like; presented with alternative ideas for such a world, they could not process them.

On the other hand, despite their belief in Blair's theory of a century of the left thwarted by the Lab/Lib divide, when the time came to forge that progressive alliance Labour had spent so long not needing to be progressive that they had entirely ceased to be so; never was a truer word spoken than Alex Wilcock's "58 MPs is not enough for a progressive alliance" speech at special conference...

We shouldn't forget in all of this the malign hand of Mandelson, but equally he isn't relevant to the longer term, it being so rare for British politics to throw up such a political sociopath. Nevertheless, as one of the few people in the Labour Party clever enough to understand all of this, it is instructive to note that he's done nothing to provide an alternative to the current Labour line, that everything is evidence of us not being progressive and that the coalition will crush us and restore Labour to its "rightful" place. But then, maybe he also understands the greater problem for Labour's immediate future.

All defeated governing parties struggle to understand why they've lost; most, indeed, believe they've done nothing wrong. When you have an ideology, eventually you can see how you deviated from it and how it deviated from what the country needed. But what do Labour have? How can you learn that you didn't do enough to not be the Tories when you've told yourself that anything is better than them?

The one thing that could save Labour is that contractual relationship with the unions, but as I said at the outset, all you need to know about where they've got to could be found at the Royal Courts of Justice last week. There they will have found the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls deliberating over the provisions of s231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of both Unite's cause and BA's legal strategy against it, what this case proves is that thirteen years of bankrolling New Labour did sweet fanny adams for the trades unions. If they'd blown that money on crack and whores it would have been one thing, but far from pissing the money away, Unite and their colleagues golden showered it on the Labour Party and still got nothing for their troubles.

With that sort of record of incompetence, it seems unlikely that the unions will be staging an eleventh-hour rescue of their political brethren. Indeed, unless Unite's members take my titular advice and sue Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley for their clearly negligent use of their union's funds, the future for the Labour Party looks pretty bleak...