Ten Years And Five Pledges Later

Rarely has something come along that so confirms my beliefs as the discovery of the Labour Party's Facebook application, iSupport. The idea is actually reasonably clever as a soft vote attractor; the application has a list of Labour's achievements and allows users to endorse those achievements and see how many other people have also endorsed them.

The only trouble is, the list of achievements is as follows;

• Labour banned fox hunting
• Labour has more than doubled overseas aid
• Labour introduced the Minimum Wage
• Labour made pubs and clubs smoke-free
• Labour will help first-time buyers by building 3 million new homes by 2020

Or, as I would describe it;

• Labour banned fox hunting and didn't police it so it's made nark all difference
• Labour left overseas aid well below UN and EU targets while increasing the need for aid by bombing the living s**t out of Iraq
• Labour introduced the Minimum Wage and failed to increase it while using it to actively discriminating against young people
• Labour was forced to make pubs and clubs smoke-free in England because the Scottish and Welsh beat them to it
• Labour will talk as long and loud as possible about building new homes because it's not a construction company, has no ideas for actually achieving that target and hopes that by 2020 the Tories will be in so they can be blamed

If anything fuels my hatred of New Labour, it is the insistence on banging on about the minor achievements while failing to notice the elephant in the room. Still, if Labour want to run their next election on the basis of a facile pledge card like that, bring them on...

And On The Fifth Day...

Halle-bloody-lujah!

No, not Ming's speech (though I'll come to that in a bit!) No, I refer to the fact that BBC News Online have finally given us a plug for Lib Dem Top Trumps, LDYS' big fundraiser at Conference. I'd be more impressed, mind you, if they hadn't plugged another organisation's free Top Trumps on carbon reduction two days ago and if the plug wasn't just under a story saying that the "Homophobia Is Gay" badges are kicking up a fuss (which I'm sure they did when we introduced them a whole year ago!)

Mind you, they did miss the bigger angle, which is that because of the way Top Trumps works there is essentially a statistical ranking of all the cards, which also means that there is a best card. Heck, a really eager journo might have tried to find the person who put together the statistics for the cards to find out which card was best, but I haven't had any calls yet...

As for Ming, can't disagree with the general opinion on the blogosphere, good speech. But I do wish he'd stop doing the arm-wavy thing at the end...

Having A Teletubby Moment

One of the other joys of the new technology is that, if you've missed the morning's business, they repeat it again for you at lunchtime! Mind you, quite why I'd want to be subjected to even more of Theo Butt Philip than I already volunteer for is beyond me... (only kidding, and Theo, hear hear!)

I'm glad at any rate that my own view on the matter of LVT was aired in the hall (yes we should have it, but it should be national, not local). But then, given the way LVT has been treated by the party generally, buried away in ALTER and forced to fight from there, we shouldn't be surprised that they decide to fight for the headline policy rather than burrowing into the less-storied overall policy.

Nevertheless, the way LVT is campaigned for does turn me off, even though I generally agree with the idea. Above all, I hate the insistence that it must be an either/or decision, the insistence that income tax is something that is uniformly bad. The aim of this tax paper was the shifting of the marginal tax rates towards the rich and I fail to see how you do that if the only tool you have to work only affects a proportion of someone's economic activity and not all of it.

We need both taxes in a system that deals holistically (that word again!) with the needs and aims of local and national government. Vince's speech hit the nail right on the head and I'm delighted that we've once again demonstrated that we are the party with considered and fair tax proposals.

Meanwhile, I fear I will miss the live debate on the Poverty paper, so if anyone at Conference is reading, all I'll say is, vote to value young people's work, vote Option B!

The Limits Of Sadness?

I promised myself that, having missed the live coverage of today's business by the remarkable feat of having something better to do, I wouldn't watch the repeats because that might constitute overdoing it. My resistance became even more fierce when I found that I was turning on to the nuclear power section of the environmental debate, which one might imagine would lead me into realms of unimaginable fury. And yet, here I am, still watching (at least until University Challenge comes and rescues me at 8!)

For fear of getting personal, I must start by saying that Deborah Newton-Cook is an idiot. I'm left with little other option after her delightfully ignorant statement that Chernobyl could happen in Britain. As someone whose undergraduate dissertation was on that very subject, I can assure her that the Chernobyl accident could only occur in that specific design of reactor and that design was only ever built in the former Soviet Union.

On the other hand, I fear that I'm starting to want to have Chris Davies' babies. This is a strange idea in two ways, namely that I'm one of the straight ones in the party and that I've actually met Chris Davies' children. But his speech was exactly the right note; our numbers have never added up, we have always believed the wildest claims of the developers of new technology (who are actually evil capitalists themselves, even if their products are nice and fluffy) and we have never considered electricity generation holistically.

At least the science wasn't totally absent; I'm delighted to see there were some interventions questioning the overall logic of biofuels, it would have been really depressing if we had taken that piece of the creed without thinking about the whole package too...

In other news, nice to see that the journalists have found LDYS in some respect (LDYS England Convenor Rachel Hamburger having just appeared with James Landale on News 24). This should of course prompt another reminder for all of you who are there to go to the LDYS stall and get conference's must-have item!

Anyhow, I'm signing off as it's approaching 8 and Exeter vs. Jesus, Cambridge is a far superior attraction!

Sunday From The Sofa

There’s something strangely comforting about watching Liberal Democrats dealing with procedural matters, so it’s apt that the opening item in today’s coverage is the FCC report. It’s also somewhat nostalgic for me, since Sunday was the only day of Conference I could watch last year and so most of what I saw was the reports. Of course, it’s also a little weird watching speeches on reports you can’t see, particularly in the case of FPC where, as the LDYS observer I was (occasionally!) in the room at the time.

One trend that hasn’t changed is the appalling quality of the captioning of speakers. Already we’ve had Jeremy Hargreaves as “Vice Chair, Federal Conference Committee” and a reference to “Golder’s Green”. I fear things can only get worse, particularly if anyone from Wales gets up…

In anticipation of another trend, can speakers kindly stop invoking the Preamble To The Federal Constitution? On the one hand it’s thoroughly dull hearing it, because we all have it written on our membership cards (heck, I just got my Welsh party variant card, so I have it written down twice!) But more than that, it is used to suggest that something should be done because it is “naturally” Lib Dem and really, we should have better reasons for doing things than “because”.

It was interesting to hear Mark Hunter suggest that “…we would no sooner blame Manchester University for the government’s decision to go to war in Iraq”. Clearly he hasn’t met the University of Manchester Students Union…

The Beeb aren’t doing well on the broadcast mechanics so far, we’ve had picture interruptions throughout (filled with generic shots of Brighton) and we’re now seeing a video presentation to the conference hall by the high-tech solution that is zooming the camera in on the screen in the hall…

Extra: Most redundant question of Conference - "James, would you like to ask a supplemental?"