Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Brown is his own Chancellor

Who runs the Treasury? asks Ben Brogan a propos of Downing Street's leaking of today's partial U-turn on capital gains tax.

"No one seriously expected the new Prime Minister to surrender all interest in his old department, but recent weeks suggest Mr Brown still has an office there," he says.

I'm not sure Ben or anyone else should be terribly surprised by this. History shows there are two sorts of Chancellors - those who have their own independent powerbase, like Denis Healey, Ken Clarke and Brown himself, and those who owe their power entirely to the Prime Minister, such as Anthony Barber, Norman Lamont, and Mr Darling.

From this list it will be seen that the more successful Chancellors tend to be the former variety, which bodes ill for Mr Darling's tenure. I continue to take the view that Jack Straw would have been a more sensible appointment.

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Is there more to Clegg than meets the eye?

I have to say that Nick Clegg went up in my estimation today after reading this story in which he pledges to lead a public campaign of law-breaking against the Government's ID card scheme.

"If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme ... I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register," he said.

Clegg has spent most of this leadership campaign giving progressives like me reasons not to vote for him - all the talk about the Lib Dems needing to stop "looking inward" is really just code for saying the party needs to travel lighter in ideological terms.

But if he really is prepared to become the first party leader in living memory to go to jail for his principles, then perhaps he is not quite the identikit member of the "political class" that on the surface he seems to be.

As I pointed out in my Saturday column last week, Gordon Brown's pretensions to be a champion of "liberty" will be pretty hollow unless he is prepares to reconsider the ID card scheme.

Loath as I am to urge him to nick any more ideas off the Tories, David Cameron's mob have put themselves on the right side of both popular opinion and liberal opinion on this one - two things that rarely seem to coincide.

Of all the crazy ideas put forward during the Blair era, this is the very first that Brown should have dispensed with in his determination to put some distance between him and his predecessor.

By comparison, supercasinos and the law on cannabis are pretty small beer.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Blair's last reshuffle

More fascinating stuff today from Anthony Seldon's new "Blair Unbound" biography currently being serialised in The Times. Today's excerpt reveals he planned to make Charles Clarke Foreign Secretary in his last big reshuffle in May 2006, but was persuaded against it following Clarke's mishandling of the row over the deportation of foreign prisoners.

Seldon goes on to claim that Blair then formulated a plan to give the job to David Miliband, but got cold feet at the last minute before settling on the third choice, Margaret Beckett.

The fascinating question here is why he decided not to promote Miliband, a move which, according to Seldon, Blair himself believed would have "renewed" the government.

Perhaps it would. But what it would also have done, of course, was hugely destabilised the government, in that the appointment to a major office of state of such an obvious potential rival to Gordon Brown for the succession would have been viewed as a declaration of war by the Brownites.

The Brownites would then have pushed harder to get the Prime Minister out, and would quite possibly have succeeded in removing him earlier than June 2007.

Seldon says that Blair decided against Miliband in the end because he had only been in the Cabinet a year, but this doesn't really ring true. I think he decided that the appointment would simply be too divisive, and opted for Beckett as the safe option.

The other interesting counterfactual question is whether, had the debacle over the deportation of foreign prisoners not happened and Clarke gone to the Foreign Office as originally planned, would he have been able to mount a successful challenge for the top job?

What it all goes to show is that, even though the Brown coronation ultimately assumed an air of historical inevitability, it never really was. Any number of circumstances could have led to a different outcome - these are just two of them.

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What should Gordon do?

I had my say HERE and HERE. Now it's the turn of Jon Cruddas, Jon Trickett and Compass.

"One strong aspect of the New Labour project that must be jettisoned is a rather dry economic puritanism which sees work as the solution to every moral and social problem. Clearly, the effective management of the economy is critical and Brown has been brilliant at it.

But a tendency to prioritise the market inverts the principal point of social democracy - to ensure society is the master and that social justice and cohesion are our objectives. Left uncontrolled, the market leads to the growth of inequality and social recession across all classes."

I really couldn't agree more. But the paraphrase contained in the Guardian's headline - "Brown's fightback must be built on a real shift to the left" - doesn't really help matters in my view.

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Monday, October 29, 2007

English Votes by English Laws by just another name

I'm with Gareth Young rather than Iain Dale over the Tories' plans for an "English Grand Committee" as set out in yesterday's Observer.. With all due to respect to the superior intellect of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, this is simply the old policy of English Votes for English Laws dressed up in new clothes.

As Gareth points out on the Campaign for an English Parliament Newsblog, not the least problematical aspect of the proposal is the idea that the Speaker would have to rule on which bills, or parts of bills, were English-only, or English-and-Welsh-only on those areas which are devolved to the Scottish Parliament but not to the Welsh Assembly.

"If, as suggested, it is up to the Speaker to decide what is and what is not English legislation then the impartiality of the Speaker will be compromised. A brief look at Gorbals Mick’s record on impartiality should alert people to the dangers of this. Even if it were up to some higher, or more impartial, authority than the Speaker to designate bills as English-only then it would inevitably cause arguments before the bill is even drafted."

To be fair to Iain Dale, he is a supporter of the CEP and he argues that an English Grand Committee would be a stepping stone towards that eventual aim. Possibly in the longer-term, but I would argue that in the shorter-term, the introduction of further assymetric devolution into the constitution will actually make things worse rather than better, and make it more likely that the end of all this will not be a union of four equal autonomous nations but four wholly independent states.

That said, the distinction between an English Grand Committee and an English Parliament will probably be lost on most voters. The Tories will doubtless get some public support for this, simply for being seen to do something about the problem while Labour continues to bury its head in the sand.

The upside for Labour is that, with the next election not due until 2009, Gordon Brown has 18 months to expose the policy as unworkable, and maybe even to come up with an alternative proposal that is, although if I knew how he could dothat without handing his Scottish heartland over to the SNP lock stock and barrel, I'd probably be sitting in his chair.

Scrapping the Barnett Formula would take much of the current heat out of the issue, but Brown cannot now do that without handing a huge propaganda victory to Alex Salmond. The sensible time to have done it, as he was warned at the time, would have been in 1998/99, when Labour was still reaping the benefit of the devolution dividend.

I have taken a fair amount of mockery down the years for taking an interest in this subject - when my son was born the joke in the Lobby was that he would be fed on Barnett Formula Milk - but I always knew it would become a big political issue one day, and now it has.

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A wider choice, please

Nominations in the Lib Dem leadership contest close on Wednesday, and it seems 99.9pc certain that the party will have a straight choice between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. The distinctions between the two candidates have sharpened over the weekend with Huhne coming out against Trident and Clegg making clear his support for the independent nuclear deterrent. Twenty years on from the infamous Steel-Owen wrangle over defence which wrecked the Liberal-SDP's chances in the 1987 election, it seems the differences within the party over this issue are as strong as ever.

Meanwhile, readers of this blog have been making clear their own view that they would have appreciated a wider choice in this leadership election, as indeed I would. My two polls show Huhne narrowly ahead of Clegg in a head-to-head contest, but well behind Charles Kennedy and Julia Goldsworthy in a notional poll involving all the candidates who previously ruled themselves out.

To say how you would cast your vote between Clegg and Huhne, click HERE. To choose between Vincent Cable, Clegg, Ed Davey, Goldsworthy, Simon Hughes, Huhne, Kennedy, Susan Kramer, David Laws and Steve Webb, click HERE. And if you think I'm paying far too much attention to the Lib Dem contest, please say so in the comments!

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