Electoral reform and all that
A hung parliament looms, and electoral reform is suddenly back on the agenda. Or not so suddenly, given that ‘GB’ (as Set 2 call him) mooted the subject in his party conference speech last September. But as Sets 1, 2 and 3 could tell you, Labour have a chequered history on electoral reform. The Jenkins Commission, appointed after Labour’s 1997 landslide victory and a product of the ill-fated Blair-Ashdown ‘project’, recommended AV+ but achieved precisely nothing.
Coming from a Labour background myself (sorry, guys) it took me some time after I’d joined the Liberal Democrats to engage in any significant way with what is, after all, almost the definitive Lib Dem ‘issue’. For someone who had supported Labour during and after the 1997 election campaign, FPTP did very nicely, thank you very much. It’s a simple truism that you begin to care far more about wasted votes when it’s your vote that’s being wasted. When in red, it didn’t – usually – feel like that to me.
The usual arguments stacked up. Strong government, and the ability to effect genuinely radical change, baulked largest for me. And yet, if the polls are to be believed, there is an outside possibility that this most iconic feature of FPTP is about to fail; that we are about to face another Feb ‘74, a hung parliament. How many seats we as a party win or lose seems to have been almost forgotten against the eternal question of ‘which way will the Lib Dems go’; James Mcintyre at the New Statesman and John Harris at the Guardian are similarly myopic in their new-found obsession with we little, lost fellow-travellers. Suddenly the Lib Dems are important to Labour again.
Which is generally bad news for the Lib Dems. Under Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats moved away from Labour, standfast Mcintyre’s revision of history which has Kennedy’s Lib Dems as Labourites manqué. They made the definitive break with the Ashdown ‘project’ which had sought ultimately a merger of the two parties, pulled out of the Joint Consultative Committee, and sought to establish themselves once more as an independent political force.
It was that preparedness to chart a new direction which attracted Labour voters, members and activists such as myself. ‘The Real Alternative’ branding may have a been a little lame in advertising terms, but it captured an essential truth. The Lib Dems were the only show in town in the 2005 General Election who offered a real, coherent, alternative choice.
It’s important that remains so. Brown’s enthusiasm for AV puts the Lib Dems in a difficult position. As James Graham rightly notes in the Guardian, there are elements of the party who aren’t quite so keen on PR; AV is a happy place for them. And yes, there is reason to believe that AV would benefit us. James is again right to note that STV – the party’s preferred mode of proportionality (AV isn’t proportional at all) – hasn’t actually worked spectacularly well for us in the places where it’s been introduced. So there are grounds for Liberal Democrat enthusiasm for Alternative Vote.
But we might as well throw away all our rhetoric on ‘wasted votes’ if we elect to back it. AV is the system of the least-worst option, not an endorsement of the views of all. The news that there’ll be a parliamentary vote next week on a referendum gives us pause. Michael Todd worries that it’ll look bad if we don’t back it – the Lib Dems refusing to back a referendum on electoral reform does have an absurd ring to it. On the other hand, this might be the one time when the public’s lack of interest in electoral reform – in the fact that it remains political geekery – could work to our advantage.
Simply put, in an election about the economy, it’s not massively likely that many swing voters will care. The best thing Nick can do next week is stick to his guns, STV or bust, and keep up the good work of maintaining the party as an independent electoral force. The best way to convince people that a vote for a Liberal Democrat isn’t one for Labour or the Tories is through action, not words. Spiking this political stunt next week would be a step in the right direction.
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Tags: Electoral Reform, Liberal Democrats
We ‘illiberal liberals’
In 2006 the United Kingdom Parliament passed a bill which aimed at criminalising expressions of racial and religious hatred.
Opposing racial and religious hatred is a laudable goal. And yet the bill found itself opposed by a diverse coalition including a range of churches and faith leaders, the National Secular Society, and my outfit – the Liberal Democrats. There was the strange sight – on the 11th July 2005, when the Bill received its Third Reading and went to the Lords – of thousands of religious leaders outside the Commons protesting against a law that was intended to give them freedom from persecution.
The fear, of course, was that any Bill aiming to outlaw insulting or abusive
comments about religion might have the effect of criminalising criticism of religion – something religious practitioners themselves, as well as Richard Dawkins – do rather well. As Lynne Featherstone put it in the Commons debate:
One of the reasons that there were 2,000 or 3,000 religious leaders outside here today was that they were concerned that they would no longer be able to practise their religion freely in this country. It is a great irony that, in seeking to achieve that freedom, the Government might prohibit it.
As Wikipedia recalls, in its original form there was even concern that the provisions of the bill might make the Bible and the Qur’an illegal. After all, if it’s incitement to religious hatred you’re after, you can’t get much more explicit than Deuteronomy 7:
1When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
2And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
3Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
Admittedly, whether any of the Jebusites were likely to sling in a complaint to the Met was doubtful, but you get the picture.
For what it’s worth, I’m a believing Christian. I’m often offended by what I take to be wrongheaded, generalising and offensive comments from those who simply don’t like – maybe even hate – religion. But worries over certain arcana of the Old Testament aside, my opposition to the law as it stood in 2005 lay in the issue that, as a liberal, I’d absolutely no right for a vaccination against criticism. We had a right – an obligation even – to be offended.
It’s on this basis that Brendan O’Neill, the editor of spiked, has taken issue with the Twitterati/blogosphere backlash against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who penned a horrendous piece about the death of the singer Stephen Gately. Laced with innuendo about the circumstances of his death (despite an autopsy report declaring ‘natural causes’ Moir informed us blithely that there was ‘nothing natural’ about it), it was offensive even by Daily Mail standards.
And thus the firestorm, fanned by Charlie Brooker and Stephen Fry, began.
O’Neill found himself frustrated by the peril of ‘illiberal liberals’ pursuing censorship, hammering out missives to the PCC, a right-thinking, know-nothing, mob. Whilst preaching tolerance, we illiberal liberals were intolerant of Moir’s right to her opinions, however unpalatable they may be.
And on the surface, in light of our track record on issues such as race and religious hatred (he noted that Lib Dem Voice specifically came out against Moir), it might seem that he was right to decry us as hypocrites.
Save for one, enormous thing, which I simply can’t do better than Charlie Brooker:
On the Mail website, it was headlined: “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death.” Since the official postmortem clearly ascribed the singer’s death to natural causes, that headline contains a fairly bold claim. Still, who am I to judge? I’m no expert when it comes to interpreting autopsy findings, unlike Moir. Presumably she’s a leading expert in forensic science, paid huge sums of money to fly around the world lecturing coroners on her latest findings. Or maybe she just wants to gay-bash a dead man?
There’s a catch though. Whilst defamation is against the law, you can’t defame the dead. Defamation offers a legal protection to at least some who are attacked on the grounds of their religion; but it’s absolutely no good to the family of Mr Gately. In the circumstances, a flurry of complaints to the PCC hardly amounts to an intolerant attack in the name of tolerance. You can dislike homosexuality and say so if that’s your thing and whilst such views make many of us uncomfortable, that’s the price of free speech, notwithstanding Labour legislation which attempted to outlaw the expression of such distasteful views.
Equally, people may not like my religion. They may think that my God’s not merely a fantasy, but a pernicious force, a fictional superhero (or villain) whose delusional existence within the walls of the believer’s mind fosters prejudice, hate and injustice. That’s their right, and I can hardly complain about it. But if someone were to demonise me on some specious basis – to allow their personal distaste for my lifestyle to become a personalised character assassination – I’d see them in court. Stephen Gately’s family don’t have that option.
O’Neill has forgotten the difference between the freedom to criticise – still extant, despite Labour’s attempts to kill it – and what, in other circumstances, might be considered defamatory. There’s a difference between free speech and free-for-all speech. There was nothing to stop Jan Moir writing an article decrying civil partnerships, if she wanted to. But when she claimed that a death determined to be ‘natural’ by the medical experts was in fact ‘unnatural’ on extraneous grounds she crossed a line.
It may ‘only’ be a moral, rather than a legal, distinction in this case, but it matters. Apparently the Mail now agrees. They’ve changed the headline, though that’s probably got something to do with Marks and Sparks and Nestle pulling their advertising.
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#welovethenhs
Nearly seven years ago, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a ‘non-resident alien’ with chronic kidney disease, I had two ‘health plans’; one for my local care (with a local service provider) and another with a national insurer in case I travelled out of state and fell ill.
Naturally enough, I’d been in the States less than three weeks when I did fall ill. Living in dorm accommodation, I got a virus, started running a fever, and was confined to bed. Having not been there very long, I didn’t know anyone in Boston at the time, so this was a tricky situation. The first visit to the clinic, which was bureaucratic in the extreme, resulted in a nice doctor telling me not very much. The second time, when my condition had worsened and I was brought in as an emergency to the night clinic, was a nightmare.
I arrived, sick, dehydrated, and struggling just to think. A nurse became very aggressive when, after giving her my name and details, she said I wasn’t one of their patients. Then she tried to coerce me into signing a form to acknowledge I was a 61 year old Canadian called Michael Finn and was thus liable for costs. She refused to let me see a doctor and continued attempting to bully me to sign the form.
Now, I’m no spring chicken, but even at my then-age of 22 I didn’t look like I was born in 1941.
In Britain, by contrast, we (still!) have healthcare free at the point of delivery, where the patient’s immediate needs are attended to without thought of a profit motive. I’ve been an outpatient on the NHS for most of this decade. I’ve also broken my arm and been admitted to A&E. And it hasn’t all been plain sailing. But for all its faults, the people I’ve dealt with – from my renal consultant, to my physiotherapist, to my GP have been absolutely outstanding individuals. It sickens me to hear the kinds of things that have been said in the United States over the last few days. I wouldn’t trade the NHS for anything; certainly not for an American ’system’ (or lack thereof) with profit at its heart which cuts corners on everything imaginable from dialysis patient care to bedside manner on admission.
Oh, and a word to our Republican cousins across the water; free speech shouldn’t equal stupid speech. Get your facts right. But then, how many of you take money from HMOs I wonder…
This sorry episode reminds me of the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003, when French Fries became Freedom Fries and Iraq was tagged as responsible for everything evil in the American consciousness. It’s all very well celebrating the virtues of democracy; but there’s not much point when it’s a democracy crippled by fear and ignorance.
I truly feel for my Democrat friends who are struggling for a hearing at the moment.
If you want to know what it’s all about, have a blimp at Robin’s piece here.
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access revisited
Election time is looming, so Labour is making it’s usual pre-election noises about access to reach out to its base. No, despite dining with financiers for twelve years and standing idly by while they nuked the economy, they’ve not forgotten you. And yes, that means you, citizens of Bootle, Merseyside (my home town), where less than one in six school-leavers go to university. Or Sheffield Brightside, also ‘enjoying’ Labour representation, where the figure is a mere eight per cent. These most loyal of Labour seats haven’t seen much benefit from ‘access’ under Labour. So much for new Britain.
It’s been a commonplace of the Lib Dem message for the last four years that ’social mobility’ has gone into reverse; but in truth it’s bad enough where it’s just stood still. The traditional Labour (and particularly Brownite) answer has been to wag an accusing finger at the ivory tower, conveniently ignoring the work many of us do for initiatives such as the access scheme my old college at Cambridge runs, which I’ve been involved with for many years.
It’s increasingly obvious this won’t wash. Labour’s emphasis on technocracy, on the obsession with prestige and accreditation, ostensibly meritocratic, was ‘elitist’ in the pernicious sense that Oxbridge admissions aren’t. Blair chose to surround himself with Oxford PPE graduates. Senior civil servants, the new review shows are (quelle surprise) disproportionately likely to have been educated in private schools, gone to Oxbridge and so on.
And again Labour tokenism rears its ugly head. Has widening participation delivered VFM? How can we encourage greater relationships between this institution and that? Truth is we (the institutions) are doing all this on our own. What we still need (and don’t have) is a state education system that gives students a chance of reaching the professions. When you’ve got an education policy divided between two ministries, that spends part of its time telling students lower down the age range that they’re not academic and should turn to vocational courses – disproportionately focused on kids from working-class backgrounds – how’s it any surprise that so few of them make it to university and thence to the professions?
Labour’s neglect of state education, coupled with the Tory expansion of the higher education sector after 1992, has turned universities into a finishing school for the middle classes, often irrelevant to the country’s needs, social, cultural or economic. Noises like this are just crass politics. Access work is urgently required at all universities – but they all know this. What’s really needed is to give state school students of non-traditional backgrounds – and those from the poorest backgrounds – something akin to the life chances of their privately educated peers, and that nettle Labour has never grasped.
Mike Baker has a characteristically sane take on the issue here.
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‘The summer of despair’
The Higher is carrying a report of a particularly florid House of Commons debate on the plight that faces the graduating class of 2009. It reminds me of one acerbic civil servant’s phrase I turned up during my own graduate work, which I’ll happily nick from him: notwithstanding ‘phrases of colossal flatulence’ and point-scoring, it doesn’t look like many positive proposals are on offer.
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A proper post…the demise of DIUS
It’s amazing to think that the demise of a government department that was far from universally welcomed on its foundation nearly two years ago has occasioned so much ire from academics and the university sector as a whole. Amazing, until you think about it for a moment and realise that the government’s shift of the universities to the business brief is a further indication of the government’s fairly myopic view of what universities are for – a myopia that was in evidence when DIUS was set up, squeezing ‘universities’ in between ‘innovation’ and ’skills’.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m against innovation, or against skills. And I agree that universities have their role to play in fostering both. I just think it’s ironic that it’s the Labour Party of all parties which has been so overtaken by technocracy that it has completely forgotten the social and cultural components of higher education. Of course, everyone knows that Charles Clarke said – or sorry, didn’t say – that medieval historians were an ornament to society. Even if his recollection about what he said or didn’t say is accurate, the fact that he thought the medieval university was simply an exercise in seeking after truth – rather than the extremely vocational place it was – speaks volumes of policymaking built on mythology.
The point is as a political scientist/historian/economist/trained piece of human capital I take exception to the government’s political economy on the issue (such as it is). Have none of these people read Alison Wolf? And the gospel of HE=innovation=growth is hardly new. The civic universities (and particularly the London technical colleges) were born out of waves of insecurity over Britain’s economic competitiveness and Victorian and Edwardian worries about the decline of apprenticeship. Sidney Webb, in his London Education (1904), banged on righteously about the role of his Technical Education Board and how more technical education – which in the course of the century became technological, then higher technological education – was required to arrest the decline of an imperial giant. For the likes of Correlli Barnett not enough was done. But for the likes of David Edgerton and (humbly…) myself, plenty was done. The shock of Britain’s twentieth century wasn’t that she became uncompetitive but that she remained so strong for so long, especially after bankrupting herself in the Second World War.
As Edgerton puts it powerfully in Warfare State, even after the Second World War Britain remained determined to hold on to a ’sharply differentiated third place’ in world affairs, and for a long time maintained a Navy, an Army, and an Air Force to match such lofty ambitions. The reform of her universities played a key role in this. In the 1950s, a then senior official at the University Grants Committee (the predecessor of HEFCE) complained to the Treasury that a NATO-sponsored postgraduate science scheme was putting pressure on domestic students. The needs of the warfare state came first.
Warfare states aside, universities have always been vocational places and the fact that Labour seems to think this isn’t so is emblematised in their continual drive to bring them further and further under the auspices of business. For a long time (until 1964), the universities were under the supervision of that most economically-conscious of departments, the Treasury. And the arrangement worked pretty well. They then spent forty -three years under the Department for Education (in its various guises), and with obvious moments of tension, this too worked reasonably well. In the last three years they’ve been under three different ministries all based on Mr Brown’s ignorance of the fact that from canon lawyers in the medieval period to engineers and biotechnologists in the present they’ve always been pretty good at providing what the nation needs.
The only change is that there was a time when Labour politicians (including Anthony Crosland, Mr Brown) recognised there was more to them than that.
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Welcome to my blog
I’m Mike Finn, a historian, educationalist and sometime political adviser.
I’ve taught history at both Oxford and Cambridge, and politics at Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham where I was a Teaching Fellow in British Politics and Governance. I have historical research interests in a wide range of areas, including the political economy of higher education, the social impact of conflict and working class culture. In my political and policy work I’m particularly interested in education, defence and youth affairs.
This blog will keep you posted on my publications, along with general musings on university life and the historical profession. Is right.
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