Unliveblogging The Leader

Apathy aside, it takes a lot to get me to miss the Leader's speech, especially when it's a leader I've so enthusiastically supported from the start making his first autumn speech. So there was an irony to my location yesterday afternoon; while Nick was before the faithful, I was with two of my Cardiff colleagues filming a quiz show (and in the first of many trailers, you can see the fruits of our labours on Monday, September 29^th at 8:30pm on BBC Four).

Then again, between BBC Parliament and the iPlayer you're never far away from a repeat, though that does lead to an important semantic question; what do you call a liveblog of a repeat? Still, here goes...

The whole podiumless/noteless thing has very much become the cultural norm, but you have to be a bit careful where you head with it; there aren't enough cameras covering you on that stage and the director is the Beeb's, not your own, so in playing the crowd, you risk failing to play to the camera, which is where you're actually talking.

While we're on the visuals, something I've been wondering about all week; much as the big video screen is very nice, the fading colour scheme looks far too grey when it gets down to human height. Maybe someone decided a brashly yellow background wasn't the right note, and that's fine, but it has to look less muddy in front of those cameras.

As for content, there's spunk to start, which is what I've been looking for from that stage for a while. There's been so much talk about authenticity this week, and the one thing that Nick brings in spades that Ming sadly never could is authenticity in attack. It's something Charles had too and I hope we'll see more of it in PMQ's in the future.

Then the segue into the economy (and incidentally, does Lembit realise the damage his campaign will do to spelling of the word segue in this country?) I'm surprised and delighted that there's a specific rejection of trickle-down economics; in the whole social liberal/economic liberal battle (such as it isn't), it strikes me that the “economic liberals” support the low-end tax cuts, but they want the trickle-down cuts too. Eleven years of New Labour have largely proved that they don't work and it's a sign of the extent to which we aren't lurching to the right that that's in there.

Similarly redistributive, a word that even I as a lefty might have blanched at using; the analysis is right, but the word has become so stigmatised that there's a definite leap of faith in using it. The explanation of paying for it worked too; savings will sound to the lay person as a pound here and a pound there and pretty soon it adds up to real money, whereas in reality the big ticket items are there to be ditched.

I'll skirt over the energy section because we've had that discussion before, but I will at least admit that if you're going to follow the Church of EnvironMentalism dogma, you might as well give it the full Billy Graham treatment and he certainly did that.

From spunk we now head to anger and at exactly the right time; talk about authenticity, when you've got child number three on the way you damn well ought to be angry about children and their prospects in this country. I'm not sure I'd have channelled that anger into the crime and justice section though; it's all right if you're going to whack a personal story in there, but if you're going to spend the anger bonus on civil liberties, no-one will care because it's something you expect the Lib Dem to be angry about.

And then the soundbite happens. I don't mind the soundbite, but I would have done it the other way round; don't say you're headed for government and then explain why, explain why and then punctuate it. Still, some nice passion through the closing stages and a reasonably neat (though mildly cheesy) linkage to Make It Happen. But then that bloody lifting gesture at the end; it doesn't look quite as bad as it did with Ming, but it's still rather wooden.

All in all, a very good job; I wish the personal stories had really been personal, about Nick and his life to emphasise that element of the narrative, but the stories there were still served a purpose. The important thing is to carry it on into the next parliamentary term, to keep the anger up, to blow past Cameron's shtick as the friendly face of the Daily Mail's version of the man on the street and actually represent the needs of the people of this country.

One Song Remains The Same To The Tune Of Another

Much has changed in my life over the two years and 101 posts of this blog's history, but my pleas of poverty when faced with the possibility of conference remain constant. And yet, while last year I enthusiastically abused BBC Parliament, this week I've found myself pretty apathetic to the whole experience.

You might conclude that this is because I, as an avowed left-winger, am unhappy about Make It Happen. Strange to report, the problem is almost the opposite; I'm unfussed either way about Make It Happen, because I'm not particularly convinced it actually changes anything.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very good document; at least one blogger described it as the best thing the party's ever produced and I wish I could remember which one because I tend to agree with that assessment. And yes, as a process geek who has had a hand in the production of an SAO's constitution, I do think the process was bad and the motion that went to conference was bad.

But I'm not convinced the poor process matters in this case because the change is so slight. For starters, we shouldn't forget that we've known about this pot of money for quite some time. Heck, back at the tail end of 2006 in my LDYS Policy Officer days, I attended an FPC meeting where Julia Goldsworthy briefed the committee about the search for this very money; indeed, I ended up getting into an row with my own Vice-President when she refused to identify specific savings despite my point that students at Freshers Fair stalls were smart enough to ask “So how are you paying for abolishing tuition fees?” and weren't going to take a vague promise of savings as an answer...

All in all, before Make It Happen we were going to save an amount of money, spend most of it on specific big ticket items and spend the remainder on that old fall back of “schools and hospitals”, an identity that in political semantics is rather vaguer than we tend to imagine. Now we've just pledged to spend that remainder on a similarly vague tax cut (probably a further increase in the personal allowance but it doesn't appear from the comfort of my sofa that it's been specified).

The importance of Make It Happen was firmly in the rhetoric, and not even in a shift to the right of the rhetoric. After the original tax paper, we got screwed with our pants on by the “what about two married teachers?” argument, and perhaps rightly so. Tax II: Attack Of The Revenue righted the policy, but by then the spin was too firmly established, that any Liberal Democrat fiddling with the mechanics of tax would screw those on middle incomes. We needed a firm commitment of an amount of money to a tax cut to change the story, to highlight the effect of everything else, and it looks to be succeeding.

There are big battles ahead, to be sure, most notably on tuition fees next Spring. But we should be clear that Make It Happen can definitely be sold on the doorstep and in the air war; that can only be a great leap forward for our party.

PS I'd link to Make It Happen directly, but as I write the Federal Party website is down. This could be a very good sign or a very bad one, but I'll leave that question to the philosophers...

A Distinct Lack Of Whispers

One thing you have to admit about Peter Black's place in the Welsh blogosphere is that he does keep you on your toes. Like Peter, I was appalled when Gareth Hughes (come on Peter, as Spike Milligan said, "that's it, name the bugger!") told viewers of Sharp End that there were concerns within the party about Kirsty Williams' ability to lead the party with small children to look after.

Now I may not walk in such exalted circles as Assembly Members, but then again we Lib Dems don't have many circles inbetween. Either way, I can safely say that in all the speculation that has gone on about the possible leadership race (and let's face it, with the timetable we've been lumbered with there's been a lot of that) I have never heard anyone say at any level in any way that the children made Kirsty unsuitable for the job.

As for the weekends rumour, I have no idea where that came from, but as once it was with Nick, a little personal story is worth noting. My most up-close experience of Kirsty at work was at a consultation session for the soon-to-be-launched education policy paper. That consultation was on a Saturday, and Kirsty drove one of her staffers and myself from Brecon to Rhayader early in the morning and led a full and fruitful day's discussion of the issues. So there.

Whatever happens in this leadership election, we are going to have a powerful female leader, and we can be rightly proud that none of the other parties in Wales are anywhere near delivering that.

Your Name Here (Subject To Bailout)

Much was made on tonight's Match Of The Day of the strange scenario at The Hawthorns, where West Brom played without a shirt sponsor because they don't have one and West Ham played without a shirt sponsor because XL Holidays went belly up on Friday, leading to this rather fetching example of the seamstress' art;

What went less noticed was that there was another club playing today whose shirt sponsor also recently collapsed. Then again, that's not entirely unreasonable, since Match Of The Day is not Newsnight* and, let's face it, amidst the shambles that is Newcastle United, who's spending any time looking at their kit?

Mind you, a few more people might be watching at Kingston Park on Sunday when Newcastle Falcons model this;

And if the rain continues to hold off, my beloved Gloucestershire will run out at the Riverside to be faced with this delightful number;

The difference, of course, is that Northern Rock only collapsed far enough for Alastair Darling to get his balls out of Gordon's pocket and do what Vince told him to. Even so, you might imagine that the newly-nationalised Rock would have cut out any extraneous spending, but apparently not.

It's entirely possible that our present Government have far too much faith in the ability of sponsorship to apply the aforementioned cosmetic product to the aforementioned porcine ungulate. Equally however, a cynic might suggest that Newcastle-upon-Tyne North and City Of Durham are somewhat more marginal than West Ham and East Ham...

Oh wait, that's right, I am a cynic...

*insert your own “Hansen and Lawro analyse Labour's woes” sketch here

Three Score Days From Now, Our Forefathers...

So what did we learn from the Midwestern love-ins of the last two weeks?

The single most salient point, I suspect, is that we should all stay away from nuclear power plants in California for the next sixty days. This whole election has been the seventh season of The West Wing for a while now; a young, oratorically gifted man from a central state making a historic run for people of his race against the wily political veteran from the west with cross-party appeal? Are you kidding me here?

But it was the two pieces of actual news from the whole process, the Vice-Presidential nominees, that sealed the deal; Joe Biden is Leo McGarry, the Washington insider who's really an outsider, while Sarah Palin is Ray Sullivan, the acceptable face of right-wing firebrandom. Of course, because of the unique way the West Wing ran the Democratic Convention, Leo never gave a speech. You suspect, however, that he'd have been about as workmanlike as Biden was. Ray Sullivan, by contrast, played the attack dog to a tee in the fictional universe.

Sarah Palin just didn't. Paul Walter got it absolutely right last night; is there anything she read off the autocue that wouldn't have been done a hundred times better by Kay Bailey Hutchinson? Rarely have so many pundits spouted so much utter guff as they have in the last twenty-four hours in trying to mention Palin's speech in the same breath as Obama's from 2004.

For the record, the two most remarkable speeches by non-principals were both on the Democratic side. Senator Bob Casey would have been the best had he gone beyond endorsing Obama despite their disagreement on abortion and made a firm statement that such disagreement does not utterly compromise the other side's judgement. As it is, the real star was Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, the best attack dog of the whole thing.

And while we're here, let's deal with the Sarah Palin issue. Yes, there are some who are attacking her out of sexism, but the vast majority of her are attacking her out of plain old hypocrisy. Does Bristol Palin's pregnancy or Trig Palin's age matter to us on the left? Of course not. But it sure as hell matters to those on the right, in Sarah's own party, and that is hypocrisy and it deserves to be called out.

In any case, I don't need to invoke sexism to know that she couldn't and shouldn't be President, a serious threat when the top of the ticket is more likely to die in office than any major party candidate since FDR. Sarah Palin isn't pro-capital punishment, pro-creationism, anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion even in cases of rape and incest and (despite her pathetic protestations that she's tough on corruption) in the pocket of the oil industry because she's a woman, she just is all those things, and that is disqualification enough.

As for the experience argument, here's the comparison; would you want someone who'd served six years as mayor of Cullompton, four years for an oil quango and two years as mayor of Glasgow commanding the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world? Barack Obama was spending eight years in the Illinois Senate (a state twenty times bigger than Alaska) and four years in the United States Senate while concurrently Sarah Palin was running a town and a state whose policy priorities are oil, oil, oil, oil and oil.

Mind you, the Sarah Palin fuss has done a tremendous job of keeping the other women of the campaign out of the headlines. And speaking of sides of the same coin, the Michelle Obama/Cindy McCain contrast couldn't be more vivid. Michelle had a great convention, but it's difficult to know which group it will play to more; the sense that she'll be another Hillary as First Lady was only reinforced, but that could easily turn off more anti-Hillary independents than it turns on pro-Hillary democrats. As for Cindy, it was only really at the convention that we learned that she might almost have Michelle's credentials as an activist and humanitarian. The contrast I can't shake off, however, is the thing John is meant to have over Barack; authenticity. Michelle was an engaging speaker and looked like a human being, Cindy was dull and looked utterly fake.

And then we come to the candidates themselves, and what is still clearly the key to this election. John McCain is a decent public speaker, but he just isn't inspirational, not even at a basic level. When they go head-to-head in the debates, if Obama can turn McCain's record on its head and lead with the inspiration we have seen he can generate, we might see a different West Wing metaphor. What I am sure we have seen these last two weeks is that Barack Obama can give John McCain the sort of butt-whupping we haven't seen since Bartlet over Ritchie. And that really could be a sight to see...