Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

How did it feel?

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of arguably the most influential record of all time, New Order's Blue Monday - known to Factory Records afiocionados simply as FAC73.

How did it feel for me when I first heard this, while sat in the 2nd floor student union bar at UCL in the spring of '83 while its pulsating bass and barely comprehensible lyrics rang out in the disco area next door? The honest answer is, absolutely terrified.

This was a record so unbearably trendy, so absolutely rooted in the dance culture that had at that time been colonised by the college's fashionable people, that it seemed to me to denote a world I could never enter. It took me a while before I overcame this instinctive aversion and added it to my record collection.

Feel free to add your own memories of the first time you heard Blue Monday in the comments. You might even care to speculate on whether the lyrics are about the death of Ian Curtis, the after-effects of cocaine, or the Falklands War, as this is something I've still not managed to work out.

Small earthquake, no-one injured

For me, the famous newspaper headline about sums up the state of the Lib Dems today following last night's rebellion over Europe. An awful lot of nonsense is being talked about Nick Clegg following the loss of three of his shadow spokesmen over the issue, but to my mind, it will do him no lasting damage and could even be seen as having strengthened the party's frontbench line-up.

I say "loss" of three spokesmen, but they are really no great loss to be honest. Justice spokesman David Heath, the most senior of the trio, is well-liked in the party, and has been a good servant to successive Lib Dem leaders, but he has hardly been setting the Thames on fire of late and giving his job to Chris Huhne has allowed Clegg to beef-up the portfolio of one of his party's few proven operators - an astute piece of political management if you ask me.

The resignations have also allowed Clegg to cut the size of his bloated Shadow Cabinet - the only reason it was the size it was being the fact that he inherited so much deadwood from Ming. This should really have been done three months ago when Clegg took over but better late than never.

The Tories, and some Lib Dem bloggers, are trying to turn this into some sort of leadership crisis for Clegg, with Huhne seemingly poised to take over the top job at last, but the idea that the party would change its leader a third time in as many years is so utterly fanciful as to be utter bollocks. Here's what I have written on Iain Dale.

At long last....

Just when you thought that the Brown Government was going to do absolutely nothing to address the English Question...up pops today's Telegraph with the revelation that that Prime Minister has ordered a review of the infamous Barnett Formula.

The figures on how the formula awards Scotland an extra £1,500 per head in public spending per year speak for themselves, but a good practical example of how this operates was recently uncovered by the Newcastle Journal which revealed that the £16bn Crossrail project would automatically mean an additional £1.6bn for Scotland - irrespective of whether it needed it.

I have to confess I had given up hope of anything being done about it this side of the general election. In a Journal Column last November, I argued that Labour's real opportunity to reform the formula came in 1999/2000 when the party was riding high politically and public expenditure as a whole was rising so sharply that the adjustment could effectively have been concealed. Now, the politics of the situation have changed utterly, with the SNP now very much in the ascendant, while public spending is no longer rising anything like as fast.

I can only imagine that Mr Brown has either become convinced that the formula is wrong in principle - a view that would be hard to reconcile with his treatment of the issue while at the Treasury - or that he has concluded that the rising level of English discontent over the issue outweighs the obvious political risks from north of the border.

March 6 update: There appears to be some doubt over whether the Telegraph story is actually true, but if so I wouldn't blame the newspaper for that. The Government has been speaking with a forked tongue over this issue for at least a decade. My hunch, for what it's worth, is that while there may be no changes planned to the BF as yet, something is rumbling in the Whitehall undergrowth.

Seven good things in life

I love being tagged by the meme, and Kate - her of the Home Blog fame - has ensnared me with this one, so here goes:

Blogging. Well, obviously.

My family, and any time I get to spend with them.

Saturday evenings spent in the kitchen, concocting a curry or a Chinese over a glass of wine.

Sunday afternoons spent in the garden, planting things and lighting bonfires.

Jack and Sarah, Gavin and Stacey, and all sweet love stories.

Prefab Sprout.

Political idealism - an increasingly rare and precious commodity.

I'm going to tag some of the best up-and-coming new(ish) blogs to be found on my blogroll, namely:

Barnacle Bill, Unenlightened Commentary, Party Political Animal, A blog from the backroom, and Letters from a Tory

Family trees

Readers may recall that a couple of weeks back I published a post calling for February 29 to be made a public holiday, in response to an initiative by the Big Green Switch website to encourage people to use the day to "do something green."

My employers, who also publish the BGS, kindly agreed to support that initiative and gave everyone in the office a couple of hours off on Friday afternoon to carry out a series of green pledges ranging from switching to low-energy lightbulbs to planting trees.

It gave me an opportunity to plant out two trees in our new garden - the old one, which was basically a paved area, didn't really allow for this - both of which have a special significance for me.

The first is a willow tree originally purchased on Good Friday, 2006. We had gone to our local garden centre that day to stock up on new plants, intending to spend a leisurely Easter Weekend in the garden. Things didn't turn out that way though, and ever since I have wanted to plant the tree as a memorial.

The second tree, pictured above, is a horse chestnut grown accidentally from a conker in the compost heap in the back garden of my old family home in the 1990s. Some of my happiest times were spent there gardening with my mum before the garden got too much for her, and it's nice to have the tree as a reminder of those days.

Many other people took up the Big Green Switch challenge, and the results can be seen here. You'll find me in that slideshow somewhere....

Cameron and Clegg v the system

My Saturday column in today's Newcastle Journal takes as its theme the current controversy over MPs expenses and the conduct of House of Commons business generally and the way in which both David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both sought to exploit that.

As the more perceptive observers of Tory politics have already noted, Mr Cameron is clearly seeking to position himself in the vanguard of a growing public desire for the modernisation of our political institutions. So, too, in his different way, is Mr Clegg.

In this sense they are both "running against Westminster" in the same way that Barack Obama and to a lesser extent John McCain are running against their own party establishments.

It's not good news for Gordon Brown, who fluffed the opportunity to seize the reform mantle last summer by bringing forward a rather timid constitutional reform package, long before the "dodgy donations" affair put paid to his ambitions to restore trust in British politics.

Woss a waste of money

I frequently find Jonathan Ross's Friday night chatshow required viewing, but as a BBC licence-payer who presumably contributes to Wossie's huge £18m salary, last night's dreadful interview with Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes left me feeling distinctly shortchanged.

Hawes is one of the most talented young actresses this country posesses yet Ross chose to treat her with utter disdain. I don't blame Ross for the fact that he clearly fancies the arse off her - so do half the men in Britain between the ages of 30 and 45 as far I can work out - but as a professional interviewer, he perhaps could have made it a little less obvious.

The sum total of his interview was basically as follows: Do you and Philip Glenister end up getting it on in Ashes to Ashes, what was that "lesbo thing" you were in a few years ago (it was Tipping the Velvet), and do you feel any differently about enacting lesbian sex scenes as straight sex scenes - a crass question since Hawes is on the record as saying she is bisexual.

"We learned absolutely nothing about her," was my wife's comment afterwards. What we did learn was that Jonathan Ross, apart from being an overpaid oaf, clearly gets off a bit on the girl-on-girl stuff.

Harry leaves with his head held high

I have always been ambivalent about the war in Afghanistan, but I have nothing but respect for Prince Harry following his tour of duty there and I am glad he was able to pursue his wish to serve his country in this way even for so short a period.

As for the person who saw fit to release this story and put British soldiers' lives at risk - as well as destroying a young man's dream - I have little more to add to what I have already said here.

The Next Speaker

Earlier this week I argued that while Michael Martin should certainly not be forced out of office in a way that would undermine the independence of the Speakership, he should start to make plans to leave his post before rather than after the next General Election. Realistically, this means within the next 12 months, as it is still quite feasible that Gordon will decide to go to the country in May next year.

A poll carried out on Iain Dale earlier this week showed long-serving (long-suffering?) deputy Sir Alan Haselhurst as the most popular choice to replace him. It will be interesting to see if my own poll produces a similar result, given this blog's more liberal-left readership.

Portillo finds his niche

Like Iain Dale I thought last night's BBC4 documentary by Michael Portillo on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher was a riveting watch. The degree of self-awareness displayed by Portillo, Michael Howard and William Hague in particular as they picked over the bones of the Tories' wilderness years was fascinating.

Portillo seemed to have been very affected by the fact that his defeat in Enfield Southgate was voted the 3rd most popular TV moment ever. Was this, I wonder, when he began to lose his appetite for leadership, and ultimately for politics in general? If so I can't really blame him - we all want to be loved after all - and he's clearly more at home in front of the cameras.

Hague once again admitted that he should not have contested the leadership in 1997 and waited until 2001 instead, something that was pointed out to him at the time by yours truly along with a number of others. It was a great tragedy for the Tories that Ken Clarke was not leader in that Parliament. He would have taken the shine off Tony Blair in no time.

Howard's admission that he knew the party had to modernise, but that he knew he was the wrong person to modernise it, was the most intriguing of all. Howard is a smart guy, but surely he would have had the self-knowledge to realise BEFORE 2003 that he was personally ill-equipped for the task of modernisation - in which case you wonder why he took on the leadership at all?

The point of the programme was to examine the continuing legacy of Margaret Thatcher to the Tories. In crude terms, it was to help destroy the premiership of John Major, then ensure that the party elected the wrong leaders in both 1997 and 2001, thereby condemning them to their two heaviest defeats in recent history.

Despite all she achieved for her party as Prime Minister, this baleful contribution after leaving office always has to be weighed in the balance.

I want John, you want Barack

Just occasionally, I disagree with my own readers. The US presidential race is one such instance.

I'm with McCain. You voted:

Barack Obama 42%
John McCain 25%
Hillary Clinton 20%
Mitt Romney 3%
Mike Huckabee 2%
None of these 8%

Why Gorbals Mick must stay - for now

I last wrote about Mr Speaker Martin on this blog in November 2006, after he had blocked David Cameron from asking pointless questions about who Tony Blair would be endorsing in the Labour leadership election.

On that occasion, I wrote that while I sympathised with Martin as a victim of the snobocracy which seeks to belittle anyone from a working-class background who rises above his station, the media hostility towards him was entirely explicable in view of his legendary acts of pettiness towards our profession in the past.

Furthermore, the cirumstances of his election in 2000 showed the Labour Party at its very worst and, like much else that happened in the party between 1994 and 2007, was a direct consequence of the Blair-Brown feud.

Blair stumbled into it by appearing to support the election of a Lib Dem speaker - his favoured candidate was in fact Ming Campbell. It provoked a backlash from backbench Labour MPs which was then gleefully stoked-up by the Brownites in order to deliver a bloody nose to Mr Tony.

One MP, a very close ally of the then Chancellor, said to me afterwards: "It was a chance for us working-class boys to put one over on the public schooboys." That was basically code for: "It was a chance for Brown to put one over on Blair."

Had No 10 not made the mistake of seeking to involve itself in an election that has always been a jealously-guarded prerogative of MPs, it is doubtful in my view that Martin would ever have been elected.

However, while I don't think the election of Mr Speaker Martin was exactly the best days' work the House of Commons ever did, the important thing about it was that it was a House of Commons decision, rather than one imposed by the executive.

And that is what is troubling me about the current wave of demands for the Speaker to go - that if he were to accede to them, it would set an extraordinarily bad precedent over one of the few offices in our constitution which is genuinely independent of the government.

If such a precedent were to be established, a future government could use that precedent to get rid of a Speaker it didn't like. That in turn would remove one of the last bastions of House of Commons independence.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I support Michael Martin's right to retire at a time of his own choosing. Although I also happen to think he should choose to go, as Betty Boothroyd did in 2000, before rather than after the next general election.