Labour leadership contest is now a certainty

The BBC leads most of its bulletins this morning with the story that Gordon Brown has committed himself to a replacement for Trident if he becomes Prime Minister.

Some appear to be wondering why this is a story at all. Surely it's just a senior Government minister making clear that he supports existing Government policy?

Well, I reckon they're missing the point. The reason this is a story is because there are quite a few people out there in the Labour Party who thought, perhaps naively, that Prime Minister Brown might turn out to take a different view on the replacement of Trident and other nuclear-related matters.

What I think is really interesting about this story - and no-one really seems to have picked up on this yet - is that it makes a Labour leadership challenge from the anti-nuclear, Meacherite left an absolute racing certainty.

Now here's the rub. Until now, it has been generally assumed that Mr Brown wanted an uncontested election, or an "orderly transition" as it is usually described.

I reckon that's wrong, and that the Chancellor has decided he would benefit much more from a contest in which he can define himself as the natural inheritor of the New Labour mantle in opposition to a challenge from the old left.

By making clear his views on Trident at this early stage, he has given the left the perfect cause on which to mount such a challenge - perfect both in the sense that their feelings about nuclear weapons make it inevitable that they will take it up, and in the sense that it portrays Brown as in touch with mainstream opinion in the country.

All Gordon has to worry about now is whether the Blairites will be convinced by this display of loyalty, or whether they will, in the end, decide to run Alan Johnson against him.

Update 1: Clare Short has now made my point for me, by saying she will no longer support Gordon Brown for the leadership, and that there should be a contest.

Update 2: My most recent column looking at the Labour leadership issue, written earlier this week, is published today in the North West Enquirer.

Update 3: Ben Rooney has included this post in today's Guardian round-up of what's on the web - the second time this blog has been featured!

Barnett back on national agenda?

I seem to have got a bit of a reputation over the years for having an interest in the Barnett Formula, the obscure Treasury funding rules which currently award Scotland £1,473 more per head in public spending than England.

So it's always nice to see other journalists occasionally taking up the issue, such as Alice Thomson in today's Telegraph.

"It must be obvious to the Chancellor that this handout is increasingly unacceptable to the English. It has allowed the Scottish Parliament to bring in free care for the elderly, free nursery places and free tuition at universities, as well as enabling them to build a £431 million parliament building. If Mr Brown wants to put a stop to claims that a Scottish MP cannot be prime minister, this is the way to do it," she writes.

Thomson is known for her closeness to Tory leader David Cameron, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the Tory frontbench do about this. For the past two elections, the Lib Dems have been the only party committed to scrapping this monstrously unfair system.

Progressive Disenfranchisement

I've had a fair amount to say recently about political cross-dressing, mainly in relation to David Cameron's attempts to re-occupy the centre ground and, in some circumstances, to triangulate his policies to the left of Tony Blair.

The one aspect of this I've not touched on so far, however, is the attempt by the Liberal Democrats to steal the Tories clothes by posing as tax cutters and abandoning their credentials as a progressive party by ditching the 50p top rate of tax.

Let me be honest about my own position. I believe in redistributive taxation, and furthermore I believe that people like me who are on decent incomes ought, in general, to pay a bigger proportion of those incomes in tax. "From each according to his means, to each according to his need" seems to me a basic ethical Christian principle that should underpin the way we do politics.

But no mainstream party is now advocating this sort of taxation system in any real sense. Even the Lib Dems, petrified that the rise of Cameron will deprive them of votes in Middle England, cannot any longer bring themselves to argue that people earning £100,000 a year or more should pay slightly more tax than those of us earning £30,000.

What this means is that whole swathes of opinion on the progressive left of politics are steadily becoming more and more disenfranchised, accelerating the process that begun under New Labour as a result of Blair's abandonment of anything resembling democratic socialism.

It's still not too late for Labour to do something about that before the next election - see post below - but what about the Lib Dems?

Well, sadly, I have seen nothing over the past three months to make me think I was in any way mistaken in my initial assessment of Charles Kennedy's overthrow as party leader and his replacement by Ming Campbell: that it was a mistake the party would come to regret.

From being the nice party in British politics, the one which actually seemed to stand for something rather than bending with every wind, they have now ditched both their leader and their most distinctive policy in what I believe will prove a vain attempt to counter the Cameron threat.

We read this weekend that Mr Kennedy himself regrets not standing in the leadership election which he triggered. I'll bet he does - with his popularity among the party grassroots, he would have won hands down.

Yet as Kennedy surmised and as a recent post on Jonathan Calder's Liberal England blog confirms, strenuous efforts were made by senior party figures such as Lord Steel to ensure an uncontested coronation for Ming Campbell.

Although Chris Huhne and Simon Hughes did their best to prevent that outcome, the end result of all these stupid machinations was that the party ended up with a leader far less popular than the one they had - and no more effective in the House of Commons for all that - and with policies far less distinctive or attractive than the ones on which they fought the last two elections.

Is it any wonder that some of us are considering voting Tory?