Colin M. Howard 1944-2008

I realise this post will probably be of little interest to those who visit here primarily for the quality of the political analysis (!) but this is my online diary as well as my political blog and I could not let today go by without noting the passing of my former choirmaster and music teacher Colin Howard, who has died in Cape Town aged 63.

As this obituary from the Cape Town Opera website reveals, Colin died on 26 May after a battle with cancer. His death was only brought to my notice earlier today.

Colin was organist and choirmaster of St Mary's Church, Hitchin and Director of Music at Hitchin Boys' School in the 1970s, and one of the greatest men I have ever met. He taught me moreorless all I know about classical and choral music and being a part of the choir in his time was one of the most important and formative experiences in my life.

Alhough he did bring to the role a huge sense of fun, he never forgot that the work of a church choir was primarily about glorifying God. I cannot improve on this description of him that appears in his Cape Town Opera obituary.

"He believed there was a place in church for a wide spectrum of music, performed to the highest standards, to the glory of God. He also felt strongly that church musicians should be people concerned with spiritual growth, willing to be team players in helping to realise the multifaceted demands of being involved in the church."

Colin was one of two or three teachers to whom I owe a very great debt. I regret I never got the chance to tell him so to his face.

Cameron fudges English Parliament issue again

Today's Daily Telegraph contains an apparently authoritative leak from Ken Clarke's "Democracy Task Force" which is looking into, among other things, possible answers to the West Lothian Question for the Tories.

Its key revelation is that Clarke has retreated from the Tories' previous position of seeking to establish an "English Grand Committee" - effectively an English Parliament within a UK Parliament - to a bizarre fudge under which, while only English MPs will be able to discuss English-only laws at the committee stage, all MPs will get a vote on third reading.

Both Iain Dale and Little Man in a Toque have already been predictably scathing about this, and they are right, although I don't blame Clarke so much as David Cameron, whose timidity on this subject is becoming legendary.

The answer to the West Lothian Question is painfully obvious and has been well-rehearesed on this blog: to give England the same degree of devolution as Scotland and equivalent democratic representation to other parts of the UK. This will require the creation of an English Parliament. Who will be the first main party leader to recognise this straightforward political reality?

Our fallen heroes

The death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan is not of course intrinsically any more or less tragic than those of the other 99, but it is obviously a sad milestone as Gordon Brown has acknowledged this morning.

The online obituaries site Lasting Tribute, which I helped launch a year ago, has put together a special section called Heroes of Afghanistan which contains full tributes to each of the hundred soldiers where people can leave their own individual tributes.

42 is not the answer

A little later than usual, but here's my weekend column from the Journal focusing on the 42-day detention issue and what it could mean for Gordon Brown.

***

There are times in politics when staging a confrontation with one’s backbenchers can be a beneficial exercise for a Prime Minister seeking to demonstrate the smack of firm leadership.

One example that springs to mind from the Tony Blair years was the row over cuts in disability benefits in 1998.

The sums involved amounted to about £60m – peanuts in public expenditure terms - but it was not the money that was important but the principle.

For Mr Blair, it was all about sending a wider message to the public that this was a “conviction government” that would not be messed around by its backbenchers as John Major’s was.

But there are other times in the lifetime of a government when backbench rebellions are needed like a hole in the head, and for Gordon Brown, such a time is now.

Hard on the heels of the 10p tax fiasco, the local election debacle, and the Crewe and Nantwich cataclysm, comes another giant-sized banana skin in the shape of the row over 42-day detention.

The plan to lock-up terror suspects without charge for six weeks is not, we are assured, being treated as an issue of confidence, and as such Mr Brown will not automatically resign if defeated.

But be that as it may, if he does indeed lose next week’s vote, it will be seen as further proof that he has lost control not just of the political agenda but of his own party.

The arguments for and against the extension of the time limit from the current 28 days to 42 days to counter the terrorist threat have been well-rehearsed.

In summary, the police, led by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, say it is needed, while the legal profession, personified by the former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, disagrees.

In an effort to placate backbenchers, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has made clear that the proposed new powers would only be used in “grave and exceptional circumstances.”

But although some Labour MPs have been won over, others remain unconvinced, and up to 40 could still rebel when the vote takes place on Wednesday.

There are doubtless good “strong government” arguments for Mr Brown not to give way to the rebels’ demands at this late stage, particularly in the context of other recent U-turns.

The government may have no real alternative but to back down on the abolition of the 10p tax rate and the proposed fuel tax increases on gas-guzzling cars – but it has not exactly enhanced the Prime Minister’s crumbling authority.

That said, there are several reasons why I think Mr Brown may have made a strategic mistake in pinning his colours so firmly to the mast on 42-day detention.

In my view, it is quite simply the wrong issue on which to make what, for him, could turn out to be the political equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand.

Why do I say this? Well, firstly, because it’s exactly the kind of thing that Mr Blair would have done.

The most telling criticism of Mr Brown that I have read in the wake of Crewe and Nantwich was from a voter who said: “We thought he was going to be different from Blair, but he’s just the same.”

That voter was speaking for millions who wanted change after the Blair years, and looked to Mr Brown to provide it.

On peripheral issues such as cannabis and casinos, he did – but on all the big questions such as tax, public service reform and counter-terrorism, there has been scarcely any deviation from the Blair agenda.

Secondly, the government’s stance on 42-day detention reeks of more of the kind of short-term tactical positioning that has been so damaging to Mr Brown over the past year.

For all I know, the Prime Minister may passionately believe in the idea deep in his heart – but the suspicion among the public is that he is just doing it to make the Tories look “soft on terror.”

There was a time when this sort of thing was regarded as clever politics, but an increasingly sophisticated electorate now sees straight through it.

No doubt Mr Brown also thought that he was being clever abolishing the 10p tax rate so he could shoot the Tory fox by cutting the standard rate from 22p to 20p. The public begged to differ.

Another reason why 42 days is the wrong issue on which to take a stand on is that the Labour Party by and large hates the idea – and this is the wrong time for Mr Brown to have a row with them.

Any immediate threat to his position will come not from the electorate as a whole but from his own MPs, and this is the constituency he currently needs to shore up.

Finally, the 42-day plan will mean guaranteed Parliamentary trench warfare throughout the remainder of the current session.

Even if it scrapes through on Wednesday, the House of Lords will certainly reject the plan and send it back to the Commons, meaning the row is set to rumble on all summer.

Over the past seven or eight months, the papers have been full of advice for Mr Brown on how he can relaunch or rescue his troubled premiership. I myself have written one or two columns along that theme.

In all that time, the best advice I have seen has come from those commentators who have advised him to stop worrying about being popular and do something radical that he really believes in.

As I have pointed out, in so doing, he might even discover that elusive “big idea” that gives some reason for his government’s continued existence - or at worst, something good to remember it by.

Does he really want to go down in history as the man who abolished part of Magna Carta? I think not.

Boardroom farce

As someone who has followed every series of The Apprentice, it has been clear for some time that the quality of candidates in this year's competition leaves a little to be desired. They probably won't thank me for saying it, but I could look around my office and spot three or four people who would have made a better fist of it than the current lot.

So the fact that four of these no-hopers have been deemed worthy of a place in the final seems somewhat farcical to say the least.

A gruelling day-long series of interviews designed to eliminate three of the remaining five candidates succeeded only in revealing that £100,000-a-year business analyst Lucinda was "too zany" to work for Sir Alan, which, privately, most of us could have told him all along.

Then again, Sir Alan's decision-making in this series has been pretty idiosyncratic all around.

He fired pert Irishwoman Jennifer Maguire well before she had a chance to mess-up big time, got rid of nice-guy Rafe even though he won nearly every task, and kept the completely clueless Michael Sophocles in the contest until the third-from-last episode.

Of the remaining four, I hope Lee McQueen manages to win. Despite bullying Sara and lying on his CV, he deserves it. And apart from anything else, if he wins he might do his reverse pterodactyl impression again.

Blair says Brown not to blame

Oh well, that's big of him. Will he now admit that, actually, he is to blame for Labour's current plight by staying at least four years beyond his sell-by date and denying Gordon the chance to win his own mandate in 2005? Don't hold your breath....

Will Labour be out of power for a decade?

Will Labour be out of power for as long as last time if it loses the next election, asks Mike Smithson on PB.com today. I say no, for the following reasons:

1. The prevailing intellectual climate is still broadly New Labour. There has been no great shift in public opinion to the right, instead the main party of the right has shifted towards the centre ground. New Labour’s current problems are to do with personality issues and having been in power too long, rather than to do with losing any great intellectual argument as Labour in the 70s and 80s did.

2. There is nothing in David Cameron’s career to date to suggest that he will be anything more than adequate as Prime Minister. Comparisons with Blair were always wide of the mark, while comparisons with Thatcher are simply absurd.

3. The current ideological proximity of the two main parties would suggest a period of pendulum swings (similar to the 60s and 70s) rather than long periods of one-party hegemony.

4. For all Labour’s current problems, it is still more ideologically united than the Tories. The Tories underlying divisions, notably over Europe, would come to the surface again once they were back in power.

Why, Sparky?

Mark Hughes will shortly be giving his first press conference as the new boss of Manchester City. If I was going to be there, I'd simply ask him: Why?

Until this week, I would have said "Sparky" was a shoo-in to be the next boss of Man United when Fergie retires in two years' time. I doubt whether the Old Trafford fans will be too keen on that idea now.

Ever Decreasing Circles

Circle Line Parties were a regular feature of rag weeks and other student japes at UCL when I went there in the 1980s. In fact I once personally organised one as the end-of-year bash for the "Pi Collective," a weirdly assorted group of people who ran the college's student magazine at the time, at least three of whom went on to become professional journalists.

Somehow I never thought that putting a stop to this fine old London tradition would be BoJo's first act as Mayor, but as Brockley Kate has pointed out, Saturday night's revellers ("I'm going round and round until I vomit" said one) rather proved his point for him.

Haymaking while the tills ring

Hay-on-Wye is a gorgeously romantic little spot which can occasionally cause people to lose their heads somewhat...but even so, the behaviour of John Prescott and Michael Levy at the Hay Festival this weekend takes some beating when it comes to political mischief-making.

During a book-signing session for his autobiography, Prezza let it slip that he thought David Miliband would be a good leader of the Labour Party.

Although he made clear he was talking about the future rather than the present,his comments were predictably over-egged by the media into a story about possible alternatives to Gordon Brown.

Prescott has been in politics long enough to know that this was exactly what would happen, so just what exactly was he playing at here? Surely nothing as cheap and nasty as deliberately undermining the Prime Minister in order to garner a bit more publicity for his wretched book?

Meanwhile Lord Levy burnished his growing reputation for serial and gratuitous acts of disloyalty by opining that Gordon Brown "lacks Blair's way with people."

I have used this before, I know...but if ever there was anyone who needed to hear Clem Attlee's famous words of advice to Harold Laski, it is surely Levy. "I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

The Not the Labour Party

This week's Saturday column in the Newcastle Journal focuses on the Conservatives and specifically on whether David Cameron needs to do more to set out a distinctive vision for the country.

***

Of all the many political truisms that get trotted out from time to time, one of the most oft-heard but possibly most misleading is the one that says oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

It is true there has been the odd election where that has been the case, but by and large, it is bunkum.

In the last election, in 2005, for instance, an unpopular and discredited Labour government was grudgingly returned to office not on its own merits but for fear of what a Michael Howard-led administration might do.

Another election that was “lost” by the opposition as opposed to “won” by the government was Labour’s “suicide note” election under the leadership of Michael Foot in 1983. The contests in 1987, 1992 and 2001 fall into a similar category.

The 1997 election was a bit of a special case. Perhaps uniquely in the past 40 years, this was an election which the opposition did as much to win as the government did to lose.

John Major’s government may have been universally derided – but Tony Blair never took victory for granted, and his mantra of “no complacency” continued long after it became obvious to everyone else that he was heading for a landslide.

Practically the only election in modern times where the old cliché about governments and oppositions did hold true was 1979, when Margaret Thatcher’s Tories defeated Jim Callaghan’s Labour.

This was not so much a triumph for “Thatcherism” which was only a half-formulated ideology at that point, as a defeat for Old Labourism in the wake of the chaos of the Winter of Discontent.

So what’s all this got to do with the present day? Well, it is clear that the next general election, if it were held tomorrow, would be another which fell into the 1979 category.

We have in this country at the present time a government that seems to have decisively lost the public’s confidence, yet an opposition that has not yet done enough to earn it.

In 1979, people voted for Mrs Thatcher despite having little idea what her government would look like – it is possible that had they known it would mean 3m unemployed, she would not have won.

Likewise today, David Cameron appears to be on course for an election win even though very few people have any clear idea what sort of Prime Minister he will turn out to be.

Mr Cameron’s true appeal would currently appear to rest on the fact that he represents the Not Labour Party, and that he is Not Gordon Brown.

The collapse of public confidence in the government has yet to be matched by any great outpouring of public enthusiasm for the Tories – hardly surprising given that Mr Cameron has turned the party into a policy-free-zone.

What we do know is fairly unconvincing. For instance, we know Mr Cameron would stick to Labour spending plans for much of his first term, while somehow delivering a large cut in inheritance tax for the richest 6pc of voters.

Meanwhile he has yet to discover a compelling “Big Idea,” while a lot of what he says is merely vacuous mood-music such as “let sunshine win the day.”

There are basically two schools of thought within the Conservative Party as to how they should respond to the current crisis facing the Brown administration.

Essentially, the debate is over whether they should follow the sort of strategy successfully employed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979, or the one equally successfully employed by Mr Blair in 1997.

Some argue that the party now needs to do very little in the way of setting out a new policy agenda, and simply sit back and let the government continue to destroy itself.

Others, however, maintain that this is not enough, and that the party still needs to articulate a clear vision of what it will do with power, as Mr Blair did to great effect between 1994-97.

This is in essence a refinement of the continuing debate within the Conservative Party over how far it needs to change in order to be entrusted again with the nation’s destiny.

By and large, those who fall into the “modernising” camp are arguing that the party still needs to do more to “decontaminate” the Tory brand.

But the seeming inevitability of a Tory victory has latterly encouraged the “traditionalists” who want Mr Cameron to stop the political cross-dressing and place more emphasis on cutting taxes and cutting crime.

At the moment, this camp seems to have the upper hand – there has been markedly less talk from Mr Cameron in recent weeks about the importance of winning from the “centre ground.”

But whichever side prevails in this argument will ultimately depend on what happens to the government.

There is still time for Mr Brown to recover, although that really depends on an improvement in the economy that is looking less and likely with each new doom-laden forecast.

The only other alternative for him is the so-called “go for broke” strategy which involves him throwing caution to the winds, doing something radical, and somehow discovering a convincing narrative.

There is also, of course, time for Labour to change its leader again, although many Labour MPs fear that would now do no more than avert a landslide.

Logically speaking, a situation in which a government has lost the public’s support but an opposition has not yet earned it should have “hung Parliament” written all over it.

Oddly enough, that is what Jim Callaghan’s pollsters told him was the best he could hope for if he were to go to the country in the autumn of 1978, as everyone expected him to.

As I have pointed out before, had Mr Callaghan known that his delay would lead not to outright Labour victory but to 18 years of Tory rule, he would have taken that hung Parliament.

Three decades on, I suspect that the current generation of Labour MPs would take it, too.

Labour's Master Plan Revealed

Hat-tip to Justin for alerting me to the existence of this brilliant analysis of what appears to be Labour's current electoral strategy. As I'm sure you will agree, it beats all the current MSM punditry hands down.

Labour will today unveil a detailed plan to alienate its last remaining pockets of support.

The central plank of the party's strategy involves identifying the 10 most popular family cars in Britain and then making them a nightmare to own.

A Labour spokesman said: "We're going for the double whammy of making them too expensive to drive, but also impossible to sell.

"And if that doesn't work we'll just spray paint a big swastika onto the bonnet."

The party is also drawing up plans to spend £200 million of taxpayers' money on a vicious PR campaign against the country's 100 most decorated war veterans.

Meanwhile teams of party researchers will tour marginal constituencies, identifying Labour voters and then kneeing them in the groin or setting fire to their coat.

And later this week, in a carefully stage-managed event at Westminster, at least 10 Cabinet ministers will explain why they intend to vote Conservative.

The spokesman added: "We'll take stock during the summer and if, at that point, there are any Labour voters left, the prime minister will send them each a personal, hand-written letter calling them a c*nt."

North-East referendum defeat was Prescott's "greatest regret"

Having closely followed the long debate over North-East regional devolution in my old role as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, I was intrigued to read this story in today's Guardian, in which John Prescott speaks of the failure to win the 2004 regional assembly referendum as his "greatest regret" in politics.

It was obvious all along that Prescott attached huge importance to the issue. Unfortunately for him, no one else in the Blair Cabinet thought it was remotely important, including of course the then Prime Minister himself.

Prescott is often derided as a figure of fun, but it is a measure of his underlying seriousness of purpose as a politician that he should regret this policy failure more than, say, the Prescott punch, the Tracey Temple affair, and building on the green belt, all of which had a much bigger impact on the way he was viewed by the press and public.

Regional government is now about as fashionable as a Spam fritter-eating Phil Collins fan in hot pants, but I for one have to admire Prezza for the fact that he is still happy to be identified with such an unpopular cause.