A different sort of 2006

To play this what if? you need to wind back to May 2005. In this alternative version, Charles announces not that he is going on and on, but that he intends to lead the party for the first half of the parliament, and let his successor have a couple of years to get to grips with the job (I don't find many people who suggest that Charles should have gone on until after the next election). It helps if you imagine that at least one of the "tired and emotional" moments did not happen and that Sandra Gidley did not mind so much about the one she knew of because Charles was going anyway. Last of all (and this is a big ask) you have to decide that in the absence of the tumult among insiders, Daisy Sampson would not have run the Kennedy "treatment for alcoholism" story.

In this scenario, there is no leadership election. As a result, perhaps Oaten is not outed and Hughes' (less damaging) private life remains a secret.

No leadership election means less press coverage, but assume that we had a couple of extra points in the opinion polls leading up to the local elections. What next?

Closets open anyway?

In April Labour were swamped by their own scandals. Perhaps they would have responded by pushing the stories on our lot out into the open. If they had not, they would be unexploded bombs, ready to go off nearer the election.

But if they hadn't exploded then, we might have won more council seats - perhaps up to one hundred more, and trimmed the Tory total by up to fifty. The results would still have been seen as good for Cameron, and he would still have had his boost, but perhaps a little less than he did get.

Drift?

Jonathan Calder put the Kennedy problem well: "It wasn't the drink that did for Charles Kennedy: it was the drift."

One consequence of there being no leadership contest is that there would have been no push for what became the Green Tax Switch. Another would certainly have been that the leadership would have stood back from the tax plans.

Lots of lib dems would have liked this, either because they were against these specific proposals (and I didn't like all of them) or because they think that the leadership leading is not "democratic" (I couldn't disagree more). But the outcome might well have been chaos.

Dealing with the negatives

One theme of Ming Campbell's leadership (like it or not) has been a concerted attempt to deal with some of the policies that count against us. He dealt with the "votes for Ian Huntley" problem in May, while conference moved us away from our high tax image in September. The emphasis now on crime is a further effort to deal our negatives.

None of this is very glamorous - and is an investment for the future rather than something that will pay off in the Opinion Polls immediately. Would we have done it in my alternative 2006? Probably not. Is it worth doing? Yes.

One last bonus for the year is that our policies are starting to hang together better. Our policy on the environment now hangs together better with our tax policy, and our tax policy now fits together with our proposals on poverty and benefits. You could almost say that something like a Lib Dem approach is emerging ("keep it simple" could almost be our slogan). Again, I don't think that we would have had this in the alternative 2006.

What next?

Hangover and children allowing, I'll deal with this tomorrow. But dealing with the negatives is not the same as providing the positives, and we face a challenging year in 2007. One concern is that when the loans for peerages issue flares up, we seem to suffer (some voters seem to rally around Labour). It probably will flare up in the New Year.

Anyway

It is a personal view and I could easily draw up both rosier and gloomier scenarios for an alternative 2006. For much of the real 2006 things seemed quite tough. Most lib dems will have looked with great envy at the press Cameron has got. Perhaps my rosiest thought for the New Year is that the British press likes to build people up just to knock'em down.

As a child, having a December birthday was a bugbear as the temptation to amalagamate my birthday with Christmas was usually too great. This year, I had cause to be thankful, as I was given Niall Ferguson's Empire for my birthday and had the chance to read it up to and over Christmas.

The subtitle (and subtext) of the book is "How Britain made the Modern World". For, whilst Ferguson's engaging (if sketchy) narrative takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of British expansion and contraction, it is the questions that this hypothesis raises that are perhaps the lasting impression of the book for me.

Ferguson puts forward a variation on the "seeds of its own destruction" argument for the end of Empire, in that ultimately it was in standing up to the far more brutal nascent German and Japanese Empires that the British Empire bankrupted itself beyond repair.

Yet the real premise of the book is that it is the export of British ideas of governance that sets the British Empire apart, and allowed the development of a liberal/Liberal world. Perhaps the key quote for me in this respect is the following:

The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which the 'ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would

1 secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;
2 secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;
3 enforce rights of contract;
4 provide stable government ... governed by pucblicly known rules;
5 provide responsive government;
6 provide honest government ... [with] no rente to favour and position;
7 provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government ... to hold taxes down [and] reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.

The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are pointe 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democrac was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.

Reading the above list, it strike me that (i) I would agree that it constitutes a blue-print for the sort of liberal society and governement I would like to see and (ii) how few places in the world there are where these conditions pertain. Much like the conditions for human betterment, which require basic physical needs to be satisfied before more esoteric concerns can be addressed, a liberal world requires a certain order.

Ferguson argues that it took the British to impose, and maintain, those conditions, in order for the world to become safe for Liberal Democracy. He uses this case to argue for a Pax Americana, indeed argues that de facto, if not de jure, an American Empire exists already (a theme he has developed in a later book).

Instinctively, as a Liberal I recoil from the imposition of anything; but at the same time, as I value Liberal Democracy should I not fight for, or authorise the fight for, those values to be allowed to others? This conundrum is encapsulated in another quote from Ferguson's book:

[The Americans have always had] a very different conception of Empire. To the Americans, reared on the myth of their own fight for freedom from British opression, formal rule over subject peoples was unpalatable. It also implied those foreign entanglements the Founding Fathers had warned against. Sooner or later, everyone must learn to be, like the Americans, self-governing and democratic - at gunpoint if necessary. In 1913 there had been a military coup in Mexico, to the grave displeasure of Woodrow Wilson, who resolved 'to teach the South American Republics to elect good men'. Walter Page, then Washington's man in London, reported a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edwar Grey, who asked:

'Suppose you have to intervene, what then?'
'Make 'em vote and live by their decisions.'
'But suppose they will not so live?'
'We'll go in and make 'em vote again.'
'And keep this up 200 years?' asked he.
'Yes', said I. 'The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.'

Anything, in other words, but take over[my emphasis] Mexico - which would have been the British solution.

The US has tried the "British Solution" in Iraq - and Ferguson's argument is that it will not stay for the long term, so it tends more towards the Mexican situation. But it does raise this question.

Can it ever be possible to bring about a world system of Liberal Democracy without imposition? And if it can't be guaranteed without the willingness to impose it, should it be pursued in those terms?

Year end advice for the Liberal Democrats tends to take the form "be bold - be bolder". The world is full of people who would like us to run faster with their agenda. And bold policies can at least as unattractive as any other kind. So this is advice to be taken in moderation.

But we could do a better job of pointing out where we are making changes. Ming's speech on Europe was a case in point. The party presented this as "making a case for Europe". And frankly the idea of a Lib Dem leader making a pro-European speech has all the excitement of "dogs bites man" for the press.

Only Euro-anoraks (of different styles) like Andrew Duff and myself seemed to spot that this was in fact a much more Eurosceptic vision than the party has usually offered. You wouldn't have gathered this from the official press release - which featured some unusual juxtaposition:

Menzies Campbell talked of the need to rejuvenate and create a dynamic Europe in which Britain plays an effective role.He said:

"Europe should take a greater role in promoting its values through its Common Foreign and Security Policy, with the full and active participation of the UK.

"The EU would better reflect its peoples’ priorities if it stuck to legislating only when necessary.

"We need a Powers Audit of the European Union. And that Audit should take place on the basis of a simple principle: only where issues are most effectively addressed by collective action, should the EU act."

The first lesson is that when you are innovating, say that you are doing so.

On the substance, Andrew Duff in the most recent edition of Lib Dem News complains about the "powers audit" and specifically about Ming's proposal to look at repatriating agricultural, regional and social policy. On the first Duff's argument - that back in 2004 conference thought the proposed constitution a good thing - is pretty weak. One of the weaknesses of the constitution is that it fails to return any significant competence to the Member States (actually I can't think of any). And there are many areas (culture? tourism?) that the EU could give up without a second thought.

On the bigger subject of agriculture and social affairs, Nick Clegg made the argument for repatriation in the Orange book - and there will be many Liberal Democrats who will agree. Jonathan Calder put it well

Nick Clegg will alarm some readers by calling for powers over social and agricultural policy to be taken from European institutions and restored to national governments, but in reality his essay marks an advance in the party's thinking on Europe. Throughout those long years when people made unkind jokes about telephone boxes and bar stools, the argument that Liberal members deployed to show that their party was still relevant was that it had been the first to advocate British membership of the Common Market. And in many ways we are still refighting the 1975 referendum campaign. We are happier defending that membership than we are recognising that we have been "in Europe" for more than 30 years (and are going to remain there) and then moving on to examine our views about how the European project should be developing.

Clegg argues that EU powers have developed in a lopsided way. He asks why the EU possesses detailed legislation on the design of a buses, the use of seatbelts in cars and noise levels in the workplace yet "remains invisible as an entity in the UN, ineffective in promoting peace in the Middle East, toothless in tackling international crime and terrorism". Being in favour of Europe is no longer enough: we have to decide what sort of Europe we want. Clegg's formulation is compelling: "the EU must only act if there is a clear cross-border issue at stake, or when collective EU action brings obvious benefits to all member states that they would not be able to secure on their own".

On these policies and on regional policies, Duff argues that "There is certainly a good case for more co-financing of these common policies between the (richer) member states and the EU but there is no sensible case for repatriation.

It is hard to see what Duff means here. The Structural Funds are already co-financed and Duff seems to forget that all the EU resources (despite the "Own Resources" terminology)ultimately come from the Member States.

In the case of the UK, Structural Funds programmes essentially mean that we spend our own money according to EU rules. And spending according to a slightly different set of rules entails a lot of bureaucracy - and a very real possibility that the UK will be fined for not doing so.

There are big tasks we need the EU for - notably on the environment - but we should be selective about it. And we should tell the world when we change our approach.

The Telegraph gives most attention to Labour's precipitous decline: from more than four hundred thousand in 1997 to fewer than two hundred thousand in 2005. But they also find space to run the Tory story:

Conservative membership has stalled during most of 2006 and may even have fallen over the last nine months, party insiders said yesterday.

Although David Cameron saw 15,000 new members in the first weeks of his leadership, the momentum has not been maintained.

While he has attracted new members, particularly younger people and women, by projecting a softer, "caring" image, some traditional Tories have left, with prominent defections to the UK Independence Party (Ukip). Party sources said it was possible that overall membership had dropped below the 290,000 level calculated last January.

I doubt that we can afford the luxury of schadenfruede on this issue. Declining membership is probably a universal phenomenen. In part, I suspect, this is because people are relatively content, and because two big wedge issues (state control of the economy and the Cold war) have disappeared.

I like the Telegraph diagnosis:

In the end, voter disenchantment and falling party rolls are aspects of the same crisis. One of the best analyses of the situation comes, surprisingly, from Charter 88, a Left-wing pressure group whose prescriptions (such as its demand for a written constitution) are mostly wrong-headed, but which understands clearly that representative democracy in Britain is being destroyed by bureaucracy. It writes: "Governments have become locked in a vicious circle of centralising power in an effort to improve public services, only to find this leads to increased dissatisfaction. The quango state – unaccountable bodies which have a direct impact on people's lives – has become a common feature of our political life."

But if we are to revive the participative institutions that used to play such an important role in local life, I doubt that the political parties will be able to form the dominant source of recruitment for them.

Is it still possible in these days to build a political project that inspires people? Localism, fewer regulations and simpler taxation, are surely part of the answer.

There isn't much appetite at this time of year for party political point-scoring. But the Willett's list - with its echoes of olde england and christmases past - fits the bill for some seasonal copy. And actually it does not really matter who is on a list of this kind. The very idea of a list of a dozen (no sportsman Willett) great men who made great British institutions is pure toryism.

Nevertheless, the Tories get a little publicity to fit in with their "iconclastic" theme by leaving out Churchill and Thatcher (why include her, you may ask?).

The other exclusions seem more significant to me: No businessman; no representative of the industrial revolution, that distinguished Britain from its neighbours; few non-conformists...

Here is the the Tory twelve:

Saint Colomba;
Alfred the Great
Henry II
Simon de Montfort
James IV of Scotland
Thomas Gresham
Cromwell
Newton
Clive of India
Sir Robert Peel
Millicent Fawcett
Nye Bevin.

Some of these are people you would want on the list. Some of them seem to be people who really don't matter (Britain would have become Christian with or without the help of Saint Colomba, Millicent Fawcett has tokenism written all over her).

And here (thematically) is my twelve

Politicians

Churchill, Gladstone, Chamberlain the elder (partly because of his dynasty).

Thinkers

John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith.

Business

"Turnip" Townsend, Jack Cohen, Abraham Darby.

Royals and Religion

Prince Albert, Elizabeth I, John Wesley.

If I were to follow my sporting inclinations and select a first XV, then John Lennon, Will Shakespeare and Charles Dickens would also make the list.

Hope you enjoy it.

In Wednesday's Guardian Simon Jenkins posited that "Ipswich proves how badly we need Tory libertarians". He does not recognise the current Conservative Party as being able to make the case for an increase in basic civil liberties:

What is the matter with the Conservative party? It once claimed a nodding acquaintance with the cause of liberty. Now it runs with the corporatist pack. If there is anything to be banned, regulated or computerised, it howls from the dispatch box for "something to be done". Be it prostitutes, drugs, prisons, NHS computers, data protection or civil rights, the Tories are desperate not to be seen as out of the action.

Just like Blair, Cameron seems content to have his agenda shaped at the behest of focus groups and the press. As Jenkins continues:

The Tories could tell us exactly what a modern Conservative means by a free society, and list the regulations and restrictions they intend to repeal in their bonfire of controls. They could seize the moment of the Ipswich headlines by declaring their determination to end counter-productive bans on consensual crime. Merely preaching an end to government interference in the private affairs of citizens is hypocritical if, when case after case comes along, Cameron funks mentioning it for fear of the press.

Indeed. Project Cameron is not about any sort of principle, as Cicero argued so persuasively earlier this week. It is solely about securing a return to power for the Conservatives, who have finally come to the realisation that the "Natural Party of Government" finds loss of power more painful than the triumph of the viewpoint of one their disparate sects (although, of course, if power was secured these internal tensions would surface immediately).

Yet what is the point of this power, if the Conservatives will not act?

If the Tories spend every day dancing attendance on the tabloids, they will get absolutely nowhere with wavering voters. If oppositions, especially those professing an aversion to an overwhelming state, cannot see how specifically to curb it, who will?

The answer is obvious - it has to be the Liberal Democrats. A clear and urgent expression of Liberty has to be our rallying cry in the run up to the general election. We owe it to the voters to offer them this choice; they will not get it from the Blue Labour parties.

It is distinctive, but it is also right.

The choice is Sunny Haidal, Peter Tatchell, Conor Foley and Dave Hill.

I have a lot of time for Sunny and Dave. But this being the internet, you can see that Dave is lagging behind and the race is between Sunny and Tatchell (there is even a bar chart).

Sunny is not just a lib dem but also a brilliant blogger, and in my view one of the most important in the country. In the new year (or maybe before) I will try to explain why.

Go and elect Sunny CiF blogger of the year!

We have already discussed the Blair/Levy case a couple of times in the last few weeks
times in the last few weeks.

It is time to put things together. Blair's case (paraphrased) was that he did what any Prime Minister (perhaps party leader) does in nominating distinguished party servants to this position. Having made a donation was no bar.

And of course there was something to this. No one really believes that Conservative donors have not had honours showered upon them in the past. And no one seriously argues that people who have devoted time and money to a political party over a number of years should be barred from representing it in the House of Lords.

The House of Lords Appointments Committee is a product of the years of Tory sleaze and NuLabour's claim to be "purer than pure". This is what they say

The Commission shares the view of the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee - previously responsible for vetting nominations for peerages - and the Committee on Standards in Public Life, that nominees should not be prevented from receiving an honour because they have made political donations.

However, the Commission must satisfy itself that the person would be a credible nominee irrespective of any payments made to a political party or cause. Other than the Chairman certificate and party leader's citation, mentioned above, the Commission may also seek further information from the nominating party, or from the nominee him or herself.

So one point to scrutinise in the Blair defence is the contention that the people proposed for peerages were enthusiastic supporters who had as part of their general support offered money too. The Independent has crushed this line:

Like the other Labour lenders that Mr Blair nominated, Dr Patel does not have a long history of working for the party. He joined Labour in 1999, and, apart from being a generous backer, is better know for his work advising on treatment of the elderly.

Sir Gulam Noon, who built a fast food empire manufacturing supermarket curries and lent Labour £250,000, seemed equally baffled. He told The Independent on Sunday last week that he assumed his nomination was for "business" and charitable work.

"I think it was for my charitable work, my building of the business," he said. "I built the company out of nothing, out of zero. [With curry] I have broken the shackles of the housewife. I donated large sums of my own earnings to the Noon Foundation - £4m." Although he has been an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour, he does not have a history of party activism and previously donated money to the Liberal Democrats.

Friends of Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley are similarly baffled. Although Mr Townsley has been a Labour member for nine years, it is not thought that Sir David Garrard is a member.

A spokesman for Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley said: "My recollection was they were told it was for services to education." That recollection is supported by documentation, seen by this newspaper.

So the claim that these were uber-activists is simply unsustainable.

Elsewhere the BBC has been looking at the resons why all of the (let's say) "genuine" Labour nominations were found to be people in good-standing, but that three of the four major donors on the list of nominations were considered to fall foul of the simple rules for political nominees ("were they of good standing in the community, both in general terms and with regard to regulatory agencies; and would their presence in the Lords enhance or diminish the reputation of the Lords"). This, remember, before the Committee had heard about the secret loans. And the conclusion:

is it pure coincidence that 75% of those nominees who'd made loans were deemed by the commission to be intrinsically unsuitable to be Lords, while 100% of those who hadn't made loans were hunky dory? Those may be statistics of significance.

Tony Blair told the police only last week that the lenders' financial support for Labour could not conceivably be a barrier to their nomination.

But it's odd, at the very least, that he should have such a different view from the Lords Appointments Commission about the necessary qualifications to be a Labour peer.

Blair has answered questions once, But he still has as much to tell us as the strangely silent David Cameron

New Labour initiatives are often dreamed up for the demands of a headline. Thereafter they are forgotten, or constantly re-announced in new guises. But perhaps Blair no longer needs reminding that a House of Lords Appointment Committee is for life, not just for Christmas?

A regular visitor to Liberal Review thinks he has found the reason. In the comments to our previous article on Al-Yamamah, James points out this article in the Times.

THE Tories under David Cameron have accepted £100,000 from the wife of a foreign arms dealer barred from making political donations in Britain.
Wafic Said, a Syrian-born Saudi, and his British wife Rosemary are accused of exploiting a loophole in the rules to fund the Tories, who are under increasing pressure to reveal their financial backers.

If the name doesn't mean much to you, here are a few details

Said has a colourful public profile. He was the middleman who profited from Britain’s biggest arms deal — “Al-Yamamah” — which involved the multi-billion-pound sale of fighters and warships to Saudi Arabia. The deal was signed by Margaret Thatcher, whose son Mark was said to have received payments for his involvement in the deal in the 1980s.

Is this why the "official opposition" can't be bothered to oppose Labour on the Al-Yamamah cover-up?

I am priveleged to number Lib Dem blogger Cicero among my friends, and think that his latest post is worthy of a plug:

Liberalism is a simple vision, but it is a powerful one. I believe that the radical changes that are coming in our society will demand wholesale reform of our political system. The death of political parties might be part of that, and for many people, not in the least unwelcome. In the face of wrench changes, where information technology could challenge the very concept of freedom as we know it, I see no coherent vision except in the idea of freedom above all things - that is Liberalism.

Amen to that.

This report quite possibly contains the smoking gun on the deal. It is (as far as we know) the only NAO report to have been completed and yet not published.

It dates back to Sir John Bourn's early years as Comptroller and Auditor General - indeed it is possible that it was commissioned by his predecessor, Sir Gordon Downey. According to the Camapaign against the Arms Trade

The NAO investigation took three years, and in March 1992 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) agreed not to publish its findings. The Chairman, Robert Sheldon MP, refusing to disclose the report even to the Committee members, simply assured them that there was "no evidence of fraud or corruption". It seems clear that the inquiry had proceeded within narrow limits: Sheldon acquitted the MoD alone of having made improper payments, finding that "the deal complied with Treasury approval and the rules of government accounting" and that "there was no misuse of public money" (Independent, 12.3.92, 24.6.97). However, the NAO only investigated the MoD; as Sheldon states, "We were not able to follow money outside the department once it is paid to the contractors, so we do not know what was done with it" (Independent, 24.6.97). Sheldon made it quite clear that the reason the report was not published was the "highly sensitive situation regarding jobs in the defence industry". (Independent, 12.3.92) Later he was even more specific: "The Saudis would have been upset". (Independent, 23.6.97)
The PAC decided not to publish the NAO report, despite the fact that most of its members were not even allowed to read it. Sheldon invited a Conservative member, Sir Michael Shaw, to read the report and to join him in interviewing Sir Michael Quinlan, Permanent Secretary at the MoD, and Sir John Bourn, head of the NAO.
The non-publication of the NAO report meant that it was impossible to dismiss charges that commissions had been paid. Members of the PAC were not happy. As Alan Williams MP said, "quite a few of us [on the Committee] had misgivings about the suppression". (Observer, 10.5.92) Dr Kim Howells MP said that the situation was "most unsatisfactory. If we can't see the report, and it goes right to the heart of the problem, what does the PAC exist for?". (Observer, 10.5.92) A former member of the PAC, Jeff Rooker MP, who had pressed for the investigation in 1989, said that he was "astonished" by the decision; "the committee is supposed to be independent of political considerations such as jobs". His colleague Dale Campbell-Savours MP, who had served on the committee for eleven years, was "convinced that payments had been made". (Independent, 12.3.92)

The police team investigating the Al-Yamamah arms deal asked for the report earlier this year, but were refused, amid an unusual debate. One Public Accounts Committee Member, Harry Cohen MP, accused Sir John Bourn of a "serious conflict of interest. Sir John did a lot of work at the MoD on Al Yamamah and here we now have the NAO covering up this report."*

The Liberal Democrats are calling for publication of the report now. The Guardian report Ming Campbell as saying "Parliament is entitled to see any report commissioned in its name. There is no reason why this report should be treated any differently."

It will be interesting to see whether the Conservatives support moves to publish this report - which might just throw some light on the constant rumours that Mark Thatcher was involved in the deal

*Prior to his appointment as Comptroller and Auditor General (agreed between Robert Shedlon and Margaret Thatcher, Sir John was Under Secretary for Defence Procurement.