The Obscurer

Thursday 8th July 2010

The First Sign Of Madness

Re-reading the final section of my previous post, I imagine a reasonable person could make an obvious riposte to my comments on public sector pensions. This person would work in the private sector, he doesn’t have an occupational pension scheme, and the personal private pension he is paying into each month is building a pension pot that, at current rates, will pay him an annuity on retirement which will just about cover the daily costs of a cup-a-soup and a small bottle of supermarket own-brand cola. He has little time for my whining, and with fair cause. After all…

“Why should my taxes rise to help pay for your gilt-edged pension, when I can’t afford to pay for a decent pension for myself?”

It’s a good point, I say, and I don’t think your taxes should rise for that reason. If there is a shortfall in public sector pensions then that should be met by the employees, or by employers within existing budgets, but it would certainly be unfair for you or others to pay more to ensure I have a good pension. As it is, whether or not public sector pensions are unaffordable is, I think, more arguable than the media often allows. That is when they aren’t just complaining that public sector pensions should be cut for the sake of it, because they are usually better than most private sector pensions.

“Ah, right,” he says, seeing me on the back foot, “but they are usually better than private sector pensions aren’t they, and that isn’t fair, is it? Why should I pay into your pension at all, when you don’t pay into mine?”

Well, it’s true that my pension may well be better than yours and you may not consider that fair. On the other hand, your pay may well be better than mine; is that also unfair? Perhaps you get a company car; why can’t I have one? We both have our pay and benefits and a good pension is one of my benefits; it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to cherry pick one area where my benefits may be better than yours and decide to reduce it for reasons of fairness, while leaving untouched other areas where your benefits may be superior to mine.

“But I don’t care if your pay or benefits are better than mine. I care that I’m paying for them. And not just me; millions of people in the private sector are paying a premium in taxes so that those in the public sector can have better pensions than we can ourselves afford.”

And millions of public sector workers pay for goods and services in the private sector, and so we pay into your wages and benefits, including into your pensions, or into the wages that you then invest in pension funds. Have a word with your employer if they choose not to provide as good a pension as my employer does. But if you must reduce things to this simplistic public sector versus private sector argument, as if both are just opposing homogeneous blocks, then whilst it’s true that you pay my wages, it’s truer to say that we all pay each other’s wages. And while your taxes do help pay for my pension, your consumption spending is also going to help pay for the occupational pension schemes of private sector workers whose pensions may similarly be better than the one you are able to afford. What’s the difference?

“Oh come on! The difference is that they are private companies and can do what they like with their revenue. That’s completely different to what government agencies do with public money. Our money.”

But it’s your money that private companies receive, just by a different method, through your discretionary spending rather than through taxation; it’s different, yes, but not, I think, completely different. Put it another way; you complain that public sector pensions are better than yours, and you are paying a premium on your taxes in order to pay for them. But many private sector occupational pensions schemes are also better than yours, because the employer pays into the pension scheme. In effect aren’t you therefore paying a premium when you buy their goods, paying a premium for their workers to have a better pension than you can have? And that premium is your money too, your money that you have had to pay on top of the price of the goods to pay for someone else’s pension. Should private sector companies also cut their occupational pension schemes in some great levelling down, simply because the benefits of such schemes are better than your own?

“No. But. That really is different. I can’t choose whether or not to pay taxes; I have to. I don’t just decide to pay my council tax, I am forced to by law, and some of that money gets paid into pensions whether I like it or not. With private sector companies I can choose who I give my money too, and so I’m not forced to pay into someone else’s pension if I don’t want to. I can always take my custom elsewhere.”

But would you?

“Eh?”

Would you?

“Would I what?”

Would you take your custom elsewhere in order to avoid paying into a private company’s staff pension scheme? It seems to me that we have reached a point where your main objection to public sector pensions being more generous than your own is because you have to pay for their services and so pay into their pensions schemes regardless; but you don’t seem to mind some private sector schemes being more generous than your own because you can simply avoid paying into such schemes by avoiding using their goods and services. So the question is, would you? Would you avoid using a private sector company solely because it means paying into a decent pension scheme? Would you ever consider not shopping at Tesco if you were to discover that some of their turnover goes into paying for a staff pension scheme that is better than your own? Would your hunt for an alternative supermarket be in any way influenced by whether or not another supermarket pays into an occupational pension scheme for their staff? Would you really object if they did? If not, and so the provision or otherwise of a staff pension scheme by a private employer plays no part in how you choose to spend your money, then surely the fact that you are able to take your custom elsewhere is not relevant to this discussion, and so should have no bearing on the provision or otherwise of a staff pensions scheme by a public sector employer to whom you have to pay your taxes. And indeed you could extrapolate this concept further; whenever you hear of something that occurs in the public sector that you think is outrageous and yet you have to pay for, consider what you would think if you heard of the same thing happening at a private sector firm you patronise, and whether you would still object to the extent that you would exercise your freedom to choose not to pay for it by taking your custom elsewhere. And if you wouldn’t, and if you would still cheerily pay for a private firm to do the self same thing that you find so objectionable in the public sector, consider that perhaps you’re not really viewing these things equally.

“”

I realise, then, that somewhere during my last paragraph, my conversation partner had disappeared. Perhaps I had flummoxed him with logic and reason? Perhaps he had tired of feeding me prepared lines to which I could deliver my prepared responses. Perhaps my mention of Tesco reminded him that he needs to pop out for some milk. Perhaps he’ll return in a few minutes with a crew to make me shut the fuck up. But perhaps, just perhaps…he didn’t exist at all, and was just a compliant FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION!

That would mean that I’ve been talking to myself, all this time. “What’s new, on this blog,” you may very well think; that is if, indeed, you exist. But this feels different. I’m tired, so very, very tired. Time to splash myself with cold water and go out for some fresh air.

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Wednesday 30th June 2010

Tribes

So, a great result for England on Sunday, no? Another fine victory over our greatest historic tribal foe. Makes one proud to be English, doesn’t it.
Sarcasm? Me? Oh no, sorry, you misunderstand. Were you still thinking about the football, and Germany? Oh well, I’ve already moved on; to cricket, and yet another one-day international victory over the hapless Australians*. But I can understand your confusion. An easy mistake to make.

As for the football, what can I add to the obvious, and that England simply aren’t good enough to justify the hopes that some people place in them? On the game itself, I do think it a tragic irony that the one time a Lampard speculative, edge-of-the-area pop actually gets into the goal, the officials manage to miss it. Fortunately, such was the extent of Germany’s victory that any dwelling on that “goal” as an example of us being robbed has been kept to a minimum. On the other hand, it has reignited the old issue of whether technology should be used to prevent such mistakes again. I seem to be in a minority here in harbouring serious doubts over technology’s use. Perhaps, if you could guarantee that such technology was limited only to judging if a ball has crossed the line, then fine; but can you? Later that evening, when Argentina scored a goal that was clearly offside, technology was mentioned again; when Eire failed to qualify for the World Cup finals thanks to an Henry handball, again the benefits of technology were mooted. Where will it end? Before you know it, perhaps every goal will have to be analysed before it is given: to see if there was perhaps an illegal tug on a defender at some time during the long, labourious build up to it being scored; to wait for the committee to decide if, on balance, the award of the free kick that led to the goal was down to the attacker diving; or perhaps we’ll have to scrutinise each free kick, corner and throw in before it is taken just in case it results in a goal, eventually. And so the game as we know it will be buggered, all to prevent the sort of decision on Sunday which is extremely rare, and which was also so blatant that technology itself shouldn’t even be required for it in the first place. No, I’m really not sure it is a road we should be going down.

But a few words on the England team. I usually get pretty hacked off when pundits say stuff like “he would have scored that in the premiership”, or “why do England players look so poor here, when they look so good in the league?” It’s bollocks, mainly. Hansen and his ilk spend each weekend bemoaning terrible misses and poor defending, as players’ form fluctuates during the course of the season; but come the World Cup, all that is strangely forgotten, and they all seem to expect the players to be as good as they appear on the “Best of…” end of season review DVDs. But, as I said, I usually get hacked off by such nonsense…but when was the last time you saw a premiership back four defend as badly as England did against Germany (Burnley excepted)? With the possible exception of Ashley Cole, did they have a clue about their roles or where they were meant to be playing? It is easy to blame the manager – and if he has lost the confidence of the players then that may be fair enough – but what is any manager meant to do when his centre-backs take it upon themselves to wander about the field aimlessly, and with no regard to positioning or formation?

Capello has also got some stick for his attacking options: why didn’t Joe Cole play a bigger part?; everyone know we should play “Gerrard-in-the-hole!” Enough, already. Was playing Heskey really the reason that Rooney had apparently forgotten how to control a football? I doubt it. There is always some simplistic solution to England’s woes; four years ago it was the failure to select Defoe, before that it used to be the manager’s refusal to play a Waddle, or a Le Tissier. I’m sure that if Capello had listened to the media and played Gerrard where they wanted him they would just have found something else to whine about. Because there’s always something, and there always will be. Because, as I said before, we’re just not good enough.

The British media collectively announced another European victory over Blighty and common sense the other day, this time regarding contentious EU labelling legislation. You’ll remember the old Metric Martyrs story, years ago? The injustice that it was made illegal to buy a pound of bananas? I was pretty shocked at the story myself; shocked that the media expected me to buy bananas by the pound anyway. Does anybody? Don’t they buy them by the bunch, or by number? Isn’t the weight irrelevant to most people, be it in pounds or kilograms? Anyway, the whole story was a pile of crap regardless, since it was and is permissible to buy groceries by the pound, as long as the shopkeeper has a metric scale.

But having told us we should be buying items such as bananas by weight, the media has now changed its mind, at least with regards eggs. New EU regulation, apparently, will mean that items will have to be labelled with their weight. By a massive leap of anti-logic, some people have decided that if a box of eggs has to be labelled by weight, it can’t also be labelled to include the number of items in the packet. “It’s an end to buying eggs by the dozen”, apparently, despite the fact that eggs almost universally come in boxes of six. It takes a special kind of stupid to think that packaging will actually be prevented from mentioning the number of contents on the inside, and no mention whatsoever is made of this in the legislation. But we are talking here about our pathetically tribal, anti-EU British press here, so I guess anything goes. And it is my perhaps debatable allegation of tribalism here which means I can just about squeeze this brief observation into my post on the theme of “tribes”.

Tribalism, of course, is a feature of our party politics, so I’m on safer ground in this third part of my post; but elements of that tribalism still surprise me. I’ve felt close to the Liberal Democrats for many a year now, being something of a student activist and a member for a time. I veered away a bit during the useless Menzies Campbell’s era, and then smug Nick Clegg’s. I stopped understanding what they really stood for – I’m not sure they themselves know – but they still got my vote at the election. Following the formation of the coalition government I was surprised by some Labourite sniping at the Lib Dems, accusing them of betrayal and the like. As an outsider who saw the Labour party as my natural allies, such tribal anti-Lib Dem sentiments took me aback somewhat. It was a reminder of one of the things I so dislike about party politics.

And now? Well, while I still wouldn’t call the Lib Dems traitors, I am getting more distressed at the way their leadership seems to have so gleefully signed up to the Conservative’s agenda; for while I may like to think of myself a something of a pluralist politically, I still, pathetically, simply cannot abide the Tories. Now, I am sure that the Lib Dems will have exerted some sort of positive influence on the recent budget, but not enough for me to be happy. On such crucial issues such as how quickly the budget deficit should be reduced, how it should be reduced, and when to start, the Lib Dems were always more-or-less in step with Labour. Now they have performed a volte-face and say they are backing the Tory’s ideas, based on a post-election worsening of the UK economic position that hasn’t actually happened. When Obama wrote a letter to the G20 leaders saying we should be careful not to instigate cuts too soon, the coalition’s reply was that each government should act depending on its individual circumstances, apparently oblivious to the irony that they keep justifying the actions they are taking in Britain by referring us to what is happening in Greece. But at least the Conservatives can state that they went into the election saying they would start the cuts now, although my fear has always been that they haven’t so much dismissed the idea that cuts now can harm the recovery – a reasonable and arguable position – as failed to understand the economics of the theory in the first place. But the Lib Dems cannot claim such ignorance.

Now, I can see why Liberal Democrat MPs may be backing the Tory policies; they are in government, in the cabinet, and governed by collective responsibility. They may be supporting things they personally have misgivings about but feel they have to go along with, to toe the party line, in the same way the Labour leadership candidates are now fighting over each other to disown some of their former policies that they went along with at the time.

More surprising to me is the attitude of so many Lib Dem bloggers and commenters on sites such as Liberal Conspiracy, where they seem to have so seamlessly adopted some typical Tory rhetoric in an effort to defend the Lib Dems and their coalition policies, the sort of rhetoric they would surely have shunned just a few months previously. But I guess the question is did they actually shun such rhetoric previously? That is to say, perhaps I simply haven’t been paying attention, and that many Lib Dem bloggers have been saying these sorts of things for ages. In which case, perhaps I’ve been part of the wrong tribe, and voted for the wrong party, all along.

One of the coalition’s recent acts was to move to speed up a change in the age at which one can draw the state pension, an action that has been openly welcomed by some Lib Dem commentators. Perhaps that shows the gap between myself and some other Lib Dems; demographic changes may mean that a later retirement age could be considered necessary for the public finances, but how it can be actively welcomed is a mystery to me. In a few short years my expected retirement age of 65 has moved to a likely 70, and I doubt that will be the end of the matter. It’s demoralising, to say the least, to see the date at which you could retire move away from you faster than the years themselves are passing by.

Changing the state retirement age has been described by some as a wake up call for people to get their personal pensions in order. Well I thought I’d done that in signing up to my occupational pension scheme, but as public sector pensions are the next item in the firing line, I don’t know how that will fare. I assume that, at the very least, my contributions will have to rise again, just a couple of years after the last review meant an increase in my contributions. But I don’t mind that, as long as such changes are based on the financing and affordability of the pension scheme itself, and not just an attempt to make public sector workers pay more to redress the unfair way many private sector employers have chosen to abandon decent pension schemes for their workers.

(As an aside – and as a final, transparent attempt to crowbar this last section of the post into my tenuous overarching theme of “tribes” – it’s funny that when I left the private sector I assumed I was just changing jobs; I had no idea at the time that, as far as some are concerned, not least many denizens of blogs and newspaper comment sections, I was also changing tribes. Despite doing a very similar job, and working at least as hard and with the same abilities as I had before, little did I realise that to some private sector workers I was now a lazy, inefficient, incompetent and overpaid public sector worker, all pampered and bloated. Now, fortunately I am lazy, inefficient, incompetent and overpaid, slightly pampered and certainly bloated; but my many hard-working colleagues must be furious at such an unjust guilt-by-association, especially since I had never been the target of such daft generalisations when in the private sector because such contempt does not appear to be reciprocal. Nowhere I think seems to show this tribalism better than the matter of pensions, where too often the financial affordability of public sector pensions plays second fiddle to the argument that it’s not fair that some people have better pensions than others. Perhaps I had been naive in my private sector days, but my move to the public sector revealed to me that tribalism can appear in the most unlikely of places, and when you least expect it.)

But how else should I personally react to this supposed financial wake up call? Voluntarily increase my pension contributions still further? For a while I had been considering taking out some AVCs to supplement my pension, and I guess that is what some would still advise, but now I’m beginning to think: for what? To add to a pension that, with each revised retirement age, I am increasingly unlikely to ever see a payout from? I used to see things through the eyes of my parent’s generation, fed on Saga adverts of suntanned old folk enjoying their long, slow, golden retirement. Now it seem far more reasonable to assume that retirement will never happen and we will have to adjust to that reality and live for the day. Rather than work harder to pay more into a pension I will never see, perhaps I should just take it easy and take life as it comes: with an expectation that I will have to work till I drop, I’m not going to slog my guts out now for no reward later.

If the change in the state pension age was intended to make us all plan more for the future, then I think it will have failed to have had the desired effect on me. When combined with the events of last year – my father, after all, passed away aged just 68 – my response is more a “fuck it…this is my life now, and I think I’ll live for the moment, thanks very much.”

*Oops.

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Tuesday 11th May 2010

Swan, With Two Nicks

One of the criticisms levelled during “bigotgate” was that, in calling Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman”, Gordon Brown was attacking his core support and displaying an ignorance of the concerns of your ordinary Labour voter. I thought at the time that that was pretty patronising and insulting, based on a tired assumption that the average Labour supporter is inherently opposed to immigration; and now that the election has been run and Labour’s vote failed to collapse any further following the discovery of Brown’s claimed contempt for a supposed Labour voters’ shibboleth, I think I’m justified in my position.

I’ve long been vexed by this strained factoid so beloved of some that most BNP voters are disenchanted former Labour supporters. It may be true, and in part it’s bandied as a way to portray the Labour party as out-of-touch and not listening to the public; but more than that it seems like a lazy smear, an implicit tying of Labour voters to racism while taking a swipe at the Labour party at the same time, because didn’t you know that the Nazis were the “National SOCIALISTS” after all, and that far from being on the far-right surely Nick Griffin and the BNP are a left-wing party, just like Labour?

But what’s in a name? You can argue about whether the BNP are far-right or far-left, but right-wing and left-wing are just simplistic, ill-fitting labels; best avoid using them if at all possible, that’s my opinion. But if you must insist, then to apply them correctly you’ll have to accept that their meanings have already been defined, the far-right label has been assigned to the BNP and their ilk, and that’s that. Meanwhile, by all means claim that, because of their name, the Nazis were “socialists”; just as long as you’re consistent, and similarly insist that North Korea must be democratic, and that a Bombay Duck is an aquatic bird.

But even ignoring all this, from my perspective, just what is this criticism of Labour? That racists feel dissatisfied with their immigration policy and have fled into the arms of Nick Griffin? If true, I’d say that’s a good thing. Put another way; why aren’t racists similarly leaving the Conservative party and supporting the BNP as far as we’re told? Is it because the Tories have an immigration policy that satisfies their bigotry? Well done them! That certainly seems to be the view of The Economist when they stated that the Conservative candidate in Romford had “managed to contain the BNP vote…by occupying much the same ground, with hardline views on immigration”. And in that light, is the failure of the BNP to breakthrough at the general election – and the collapse of their vote in the council elections in Barking – an unqualified good sign? I sincerely hope it is; I hope it is because people have turned their backs on their poison. I hope it isn’t simply because the main parties have just pandered to the prejudices the BNP have stoked, occupied “much of the same ground” that they do, and been rewarded for holding the bigot line. I hope.

This post is looking suspiciously as if it is a sort of re-run of my previous one; a moan about the parties’ immigration policies and a look to what the future holds, my current observations on the political scene splurged out and then reconstituted into some vague sort of order. If that’s what you suspect, then you’d be right. So, a-week-and-a-bit on, how are we fixed? David Cameron’s party won the largest number of votes and seats at the general election, but not an absolute majority. He’s made an offer to the Lib Dems to join in a coalition, and we’re waiting for Nick Clegg’s response. Cameron has, however, staked out a few red lines that cannot be crossed and where change in policy cannot be countenanced. Proportional representation isn’t one of them, but immigration – the subject that no one can talk about, and which the main parties all ignore – is. Go figure.

For a few days it was looking like the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats were going to strike some sort of deal; then yesterday Gordon Brown resigned while announcing that Labour and the Lib Dems have entered into formal negotiations, and this has shaken things up a bit. The Tories responded to Brown’s resignation by offering a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system. I stand by my previous post, where I stated that I hoped that a hung parliament could provide us with proportional representation (PR), and that a Liberal / Labour coalition is the most likely way to get it. AV is a step in the right direction but it is not proportional representation, and I would still like to hold out for PR at this time, fearing that a move to the imperfect less-than-half-measure of AV could park PR for an age. My heart, then, goes with Nosemonkey in this post, who broadly agrees with my pre-election hope for a short-term Lib-Lab coalition government that could run a referendum on full proportional representation and then hold a fresh election; by my head looks at the post-election arithmetic and tells me that Donald S is more on the money and that a Lib-Con agreement is the best bet. Last week I thought that the policy gap between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives was too large for them to ever do a deal, but the electoral mathematics does concentrate the mind, and despite complaints from some, that simple maths does mean that even if you assume the Lib Dems have a moral duty to join with Labour – and they most certainly don’t – even rabid anti-Tories like me can’t accuse them of a betrayal if they side with the largest party to form the most stable coalition on offer; instead I’ll keep my powder dry so I can charge them with betrayal based on what they do in government, if required. I’m torn then between common sense and wishful thinking, hoping for a “progressive alliance” (as the the current jargon has it) that would allow the voting reforms I want, would allow Labour to honourably drop ID cards and other albatrosses during the negotiations, and would hold a stable government together for the time being. But I think it likely that something somewhere has got to give.

As things stand there are three potential governments on offer; a Lib-Con coalition, a Lib-Lab coalition, and a minority Conservative government, and which I have placed in descending order of legitimacy and stability. Certainly, the first, Lib-Con option with an absolute majority of seats would be the most stable and would have more legitimacy than a Lib-Lab coalition of 315 out of 650 seats and 51% of the votes; but if the Liberal Democrats simply feel they cannot do a deal with the Conservatives, I’d personally still give a Lib-Lab coalition more legitimacy than a Conservative minority government based on just 306 seats and 36% of the votes, and in resigning Brown’s swansong is merely to make the Lib-Lab option a vague possibility; I don’t see it as a way to unfairly usurp the Tories, who, after all, simply did not win this election. I also don’t feel that the Tories can both defend the current electoral system and complain if Labour do stay in power with a supposedly “unelected prime minister”, since that is a feature of the parliamentary system they support; any new Labour prime minister would, if I’ve counted correctly, be the umpteenth “unelected” PM by such a definition, so unless the Conservatives propose a further change to the electoral system they’ll just have to lump it. It has, though, been argued that the Lib Dems’ support could suffer if they are seen to be propping up a failed Labour government, which may be true; but a slump in their support alongside a new proportional electoral system would probably still reward them with more seats at the next election than if they were to do the alleged noble thing and support the Tories while full PR is kicked into touch.

I do understand that it could seem indulgent to be worrying about proportional representation now, when there is an economic crisis to deal with, but quite apart from the fact that I don’t trust the Tories on the economy anyway I don’t think that organising a referendum on the electoral system need distract anyone from the matter of dealing with the deficit. Has no one heard of multi-tasking? Of course, now is the time for those hoary old criticisms of proportional representation to get wheeled out, such as the way it fails to produce stable governments. Oh, er, kinda like we have now under first-past-the-post. The “smoke-filled rooms” line has been allowed a run out too, and the warning that the current horse-trading could be a permanent fixture under PR; what must the public think of politicians at the moment, worry the politicians? But, as far as I can observe, the public aren’t nearly as interested in politicians as they think we are, and we’re getting on with our lives just fine, happy for those apparently baleful negotiations go on for as long as is necessary, and content for the media to fret and frown on our behalf, and to successfully misread the public mood again. And which is worse; for minority parties to have to trade policies based on a wider support, or for a minority party to have total power to impose its will with no regard to what a majority think? After all, in 2005 Labour was elected with the votes of just 36% of the electorate; they didn’t need to enter into any dreaded deals, but are we honestly suggesting that even those 36% got what they wanted? Since a mere 28% voted Labour this time, that seems unlikely.

Are there many people unconnected to Labour or the Conservative who swallows the guff trotted out in favour of first-past-the-post? The strong, personal constituency link between an MP and their constituents is one argument, but this ignores the fact that under the favoured single transferable vote (STV) system there are multi-member constituencies that not only maintain that link, but to my mind improve on it. One argument is that in first-past-the-post you can “vote the bugger out” if you don’t like your MP, but a Labour voter who hates their sitting Labour MP is on the horns of a dilemma on whether to vote for their party or against the sitting MP; with STV, as each party puts forward more than one candidate, you can do both. Of course, multi-member constituencies are likely to be larger than those single member constituencies we currently have, but I don’t see how the Tories can use that as an argument as they want to reduce the number of MPs as it is, and so, presumably, want to increase the size of each constituency and the number of constituents per MP. At least with STV, while you increase the size of the constituencies you also increase the number of MPs answerable to you, allowing you to shop around for the one more sympathetic to your position if you want them to raise an issue for you.

In all it’s hard not to see that at its heart the reason that most Tories don’t want full PR is because they feel it will mean that they will be shut out of power for generations by centre-left coalition governments. It seems an implicit acceptance that you think that your policies, even with coalition partners, will struggle to ever gain a majority support, and so you prefer to stick with a system that includes distortions that periodically work in your favour. Labour is no better; when I hear the likes of that shitbag John Reid apparently nobly admitting that Labour have lost the election, should listen to the public and allow the Tories to form a government, I hear a tribal Labourite trying to scupper the possibility of proportional representation in the short term so that Labour can benefit in the long term. When Reid says he fears Labour will be damaged by being seen to be clinging to power with the Lib Dems, my immediate response is to say I don’t care about the future of the Labour party; my more considered response is that no one knows how our electoral landscape will look under PR, and I’m perfectly happy with that. Proportional representation may let minority parties like the BNP gain seats, but only if they earn their support; it could also provide room for pro-immigration parties to flourish, and hopefully change the whole nature of that particular debate. I can imagine that the coalitions that are the Labour and Conservative parties have only been held together because of first-past-the-post, and that under proportional representation they could well splinter into more clearly defined groupings that provide the electorate with a far greater choice. It is way too simplistic to say that there is an anti-Conservative majority in Britain, there are many Tory policies that gain widespread, majority support, it’s just that the full package doesn’t; but it appears I have more faith than many in the Conservative party that a centre-right coalition could take power in the UK, just as they do all over the world. The fact is, though, that I don’t know how proportional representation will work out if adopted; I don’t think that it is a panacea and that all in the garden will be rosy, I don’t assume that it will mean I will always get a government that I see eye-to-eye with, and I don’t think that as an electoral system it is perfect (albeit I do think that its imperfections are less egregious than those of other systems). I don’t even know if a referendum on proportional representation would result in a vote for a change to our electoral system; but I think we should try our best to find out.

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Friday 30th April 2010

Say The Right Things

I’ve been busy with things and stuff recently, but that isn’t the reason I’ve barely commented on this general election gubbins. Considering this is the first election for ages where the result is up for grabs it’s been a remarkably tedious campaign. It isn’t the only reason, but I think the TV debates have been a large part of the problem. They’ve sucked the life out of the day-to-day campaigning, and from the first debate everything has seemed to hinge on what happens in each of the three weekly televised style trials with all else put on the back burner; and what has happened in the debates themselves amounts to “not a lot”. It could well be that my interest in politics has simply waned; but gone, it seems, are the daily twists and turns in a campaign that in the past would cause me to follow the news with a trainspotterish devotion during election times.

The first debate on ITV began in what was for me an ominous and eye-roll inducing manner, with a question about immigration. After each of the three party leaders had spoken it elicited my first comment on the election, via Twitter.

As an open borders man they’ve all lost my vote. Bunch o’twats. When’s ‘Outnumbered’ on? #leadersdebate

At the time I didn’t really mean that I wouldn’t vote, but as the leaders reprised their roles in the Sky and BBC debates, during which each of them tried to outdo the others and to show how they would be the most effective at tackling immigration – taking it as read that it is a problem, is too high and needs to be reduced, without advancing any reason for why it is a problem and too high – I was taking the “fuck the lot of them” option more seriously. As it is I will probably still vote non-Tory on May the 6th – in my case that’s Liberal Democrat – but that’s nothing to shout about.

The fact that each leaders’ debate – and #bigotgate, the sole example, albeit tedious, of anything outside the TV debates being considered devastatingly newsworthy by our media – was concerned with the matter of immigration gives the lie to the “you can’t say anything about the immigrants” trope. For one thing, the statement that “you can’t say anything about the immigrants” tends to be used when talking about immigration, rendering it as prima facie bollocks; for another, if it is true that you can’t talk about immigration, at the very least our tabloid press never received the memo. The fact is that you can talk about immigration, as much as you like; it’s just that having done so you’re not then protected against being called a bigot in return, if you’re talking to someone who thinks you’re displaying bigotry. And it’s not even “closing down debate” to be called a bigot; it is debate. You’re free to respond to and deny the charge of bigotry if you like. That’s how this free speech thing works. If anyone has genuine cause to feel restricted in saying what they feel then it is apparently those politicians who in private don’t have a problem with immigration and see some anti-immigration rhetoric as bigotry, as it surely is, but who in public have to pander to people’s “legitimate concerns” – which range from the legitimate to the xenophobic – rather than to actually defend immigration and the huge benefits that it brings as evidenced in countless reports, or to even defend immigration on liberal grounds as a right in itself.

The one thing the TV debates have done, however, is to have thrown the election wide open, as Nick Clegg hijacked the “change” vote by virtue of standing next to David Cameron for 90 minutes and robbing the latter of his USP. The Liberal Democrats soared in the polls, but for the most depressing of reasons I fear. I doubt very much that many people saw the first debate and were swayed by the Lib Dems’ rag-bag of policies; they saw a reasonable, normal looking person who was well presented and who exhibited a devastating ability to write down the questioners’ names and to then refer back to them in his closing speech, and who was neither a scary alien robot creature from planet Tory, nor Gordon Brown. It’s a crap reason to decide who you’ll vote for and to alter the course of the election so decisively, and for that reason I’d be happy to see the back of the leaders’ debates from now on, but we’re obviously stuck with them. I hope, though, that they have at least served one purpose. They have made a hung parliament all the more likely, a hung parliament that may well require the ruling party to rely on the Liberal Democrats, and which could in turn ensure we finally abandon the anachronistic First Past The Post electoral system in favour of some form of proportional representation. Nothing illustrates FPTP’s failings more than those projections that show that, based on current polls, the Conservatives could end up winning the most votes with Labour pushed down into third place, and yet the electoral system would award Labour the most number of seats in parliament. If that does happen, I wonder how the Conservatives, with their staunch support for FPTP, could possibly object if Labour, as the largest party in the House of Commons, are then given the first chance to form the new government?

Shh. Come with me on this. After the election Labour are the largest party, and the Lib Dems agree to work with them on the condition that Gordon Brown steps down, and either voluntarily or by palace coup, he does. The new Labour leader becomes prime minister on the understanding that there will be a referendum on proportional representation and a fresh general election held under the new rules immediately following that result. First Past The Post is ditched for the Single Transferable Vote, and following a new election everyone lives happily ever after. Future elections even feature an open and mature debate on immigration.

What do you reckon? I know, I know; you were with me up to and including the “everyone lives happily ever after” bit, but after that I went a bit daft.

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Friday 26th March 2010

On A Plate: Italy

Talking of which (not that I was) here is the latest tip from my irregular cookery series. And that tip is…use passata.
Once upon a time I decided to make a pasta Bolognese for tea – I’m a big fan of using cavatappi myself, having bored with spaghetti a while ago – but all of a sudden I realised we were without a ready-made pasta sauce in the cupboard. We’d often rely on a jar of something like Loyd Grossman’s Primavera or a Sacla Cherry Tomato and Basil sauce for ease of thing; many are nice although none are perfect, the main problem being that the kids baulk at the sight of any “lumps”, such as a miniscule sliver of onion or a tiny cube of tomato, and so we’d have to meticulously pick those bits out prior to serving. Such concerns are irrelevant, though, if you don’t have a jar in; so what to do? Fortunately, way at the back of the cupboard, sat a carton of passata that I’ll have bought in with the intention of making something a bit more adventurous sometime (I’ve got a great recipe for puttanesca somewhere). That’ll have to do, I thought, because I’d my heart set on Bolognese and red wine by now and I couldn’t be bothered popping out to the shops.

Passata on it’s own I knew would be pretty dull – it’s just sieved tomatoes at the end of the day – so first I fried a bit of garlic, dried basil and dried oregano in a little bit of olive oil; then I added the passata and stirred well. I warmed it through a bit, then gave it a little taste. It was still a tad bland, so I added a bit of salt. Tasting it again the flavour had certainly pepped up but now I thought it a little bitter, so I chucked is a sprinkling of sugar. That did the trick, and soon I was left with a simple pasta sauce as nice as any I’d tasted before.

The first and most obvious advantage I noticed in making your own sauce is that there are no bits in to annoy the kids – or to annoy me when having to pick them out – so long as you don’t stupidly add them in the first place. But I also realised that this must be pretty much all that pasta sauce manufacturers are doing; taking passata and adding stuff to it. The beauty of adding that stuff yourself, of course, is that now, rather than shopping around and trying to find a pasta sauce that is just to your liking, it is just as easy to buy passata and then customise your sauce however you like depending on your situation or mood; so, just garlic, oregano and basil if we’re eating with the kids, but, say, onions, capers and chillies too if it’s just me and the wife. And it is, of course, far cheaper to do yourself what you’d otherwise be paying Sig. Dolmio to do for you. So, now you know what to do, take this rotten old tree and make it bear fruit.

But a warning; this knowledge is dangerous. There is a lucrative pasta sauce industry out there, charging up to £2 for little more than 35p passata with bits. That’s quite a mark-up, their profit margins must be enormous, but can this last? I doubt it. It can’t be long before word spreads and it becomes common knowledge that what had looked at first glance to be the manufacturers “adding value” now seems to be little more than “adding oregano”. I fear we have an enormous, inflated and overheated “pomodoro bubble” here which is about to pop, splashing tomato sauce all over the tiling and hob. So I’m entrusting you to use this new information wisely and cautiously. Sell your shares in Ragu for sure, but allow this information to simmer out gradually, so there is just a gradual decline in the sales of those inefficient and overpriced pasta sauces rather than a sudden crash, giving the manufacturers enough time to find another way to rip us off. The last thing I want to see is a penniless and dejected Loyd Grossman, his pasta sauce business in tatters, begging to be let back on MasterChef; but as a contestant, imploring one and all that the only thing he’s ever wanted to do is to work in a kitchen.

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