For just over four years I was the leader of the Liberal Democrat group in Haringey. It was a good period for the party - from winning our first three seats in Haringey through to growing to a group of fifteen at the next elections, for years on. But there is one thing about my experience as group leader that I have real doubts over. It's the question of how the party elects its group leader.

Group leaders - especially those where we run the council or are challenging to run the council - are some of the most important people in the party in terms of real power wielded that affects people's lives.

Group leaders vary hugely - from the leader of a small group through to the person who runs a multi-million council and has more power than many MPs - but one thing they all have in common is that party members do not get a say in who they are.

And this is my cause of doubt. I have had to campaign for votes from party members for all sorts of things during my time in the party but for group leader - it was only fellow councillors who got a say. Now - when there were only three of us councillors back in 2002, divvying up the roles of leader, deputy leader and chief whip wasn't the most competitive or angst-ridden of processes! Between us, we were all happy with who did what. But even where there is real choice and disagreement - and where the result determines who heads up a council, one of the most important political jobs there is - party members do not get a say.

As I type this I can just imagine the thoughts going through some councillors' minds at the idea of members electing their group leader rather than they themselves.

So - I want to take you back to the start of this year. I just want you to imagine if our party leader was elected in the equivalent way to the way in which our council group leaders are elected. That is, by the MPs alone with party members not having any say.

Imagine if we had had an election that way at the start of the year and I had then come along to the recent London Liberal Democrats conference to say how well I thought the process worked, how the leader is the leader of the MPs - so of course it should only be MPs who should get a say - and maybe made a joke or two about some oddball members and asked if you really wanted to entrust the very serious and important choice of leader to people like that?

I don't think I'd have been very popular - and rightly so!

So instead I ask - think of all the reasons why it was right and proper that I and everyone else in this room had one vote in the selection of the leader, and then ask - why doesn't the same reasoning apply to the leader of council groups? Of course, a council group leader needs to have support of their councillors and they are the people who know the candidates best - but that can be dealt with by the nomination rules (as with party leader where a candidate has to currently have the support and be nominated by 7 MPs).

This isn't just a theoretical question, because think again - think of where local parties have gone horribly off the rails, falling apart into infighting and dispute. Almost always, a large part of the story is that the council group and members have gone off in different directions with splits opening up between councillors and party.

Having the group leader elected by members could be an important piece of glue holding the party together.

So it might be that this is the right thing to do not just in its own terms - democratic - but also the right pragmatic thing to do - to help head off some of the problems of division we've sometimes had in the past. And don't forget the benefits too of encouraging councillors to remember how important members are, to retain them and to communicate with them - whilst also giving more members more of a say and a participation in local politics and decision making. That's what we're about as a party, aren't we?

The logic of what I have written sounds pretty good to me - and the various people I've tried it out on seem to agree too. Yet within the party, I can't recall any move to introduce these sorts of changes? So have I got it all wrong, or is it time we changed things?

I've been a webcast guinea pig!

I was one of a trio of people who tried out doing a daily video diary / webcast / online film / call it what you will from the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton this year. The other two were our leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, and my friend Duncan Brack - who chairs the conference committee. We were also joined on various days by a few "special guests", such as Paddy Ashdown who did one broadcast himself too. (Given Paddy's well-known fondness for hi-tech gadgetry and his background, I was a bit disappointed to find he didn't go round with his own live web-casting camera sown into a buttonhole!).

So - what to make of it? My pieces were all done in a couple of takes. I simply talked off the cuff - and then repeated the procedure so that if I mangled my words or there was a hitch with the sound etc, there was a second take to use instead. I liked the freedom to talk at greater length than you normally get with the broadcast media - and without a Jeremy Paxman wannabe interrupting every nanosecond to ask another question! Talking off the cuff also made the whole operation quite quick to do.

As to whether the results were worth it ... you'll have to watch and be the judge! Personally decided that use of hands akin to windmills not helpful and somewhat distracting. However, for a first time out - not too painful.

The Lib Dems aren't the only people trying out such films. I notice that David Cameron has got in on the act too now. The wobbly hand-held camera just tries a bit TOO hard to say, "hey, this is me, I'm real, I'm not really a politician, you know".

And I am very dubious about the way his family - including children - appear. It's almost as if they're extra props to say: "hey, this is me, I'm real, I'm not really a politician".

I've don't feature my family in photos on leaflets - and only rarely mention them elsewhere in politics. Children are such a big (and wonderful!) part of any parent's life, you can't act as if they don't exist - but I think you have to be very, very careful to avoid being seen to exploit them for political gain. It also leaves you wide open to charges of hypocrisy if you subsequently try to protect them from media intrusion. After all, if you say, "look what a good parent I am", what answer do you then have to a journalist who says, "that means it's fair game for me to find out if you really are a good parent?" and so goes nosing around into what you're children are doing and how they're faring?

But back to webcasting - is it the future? I hope it helps engage more directly with people who wouldn't otherwise pay attention to politics - and I've tried one on a local hospital issue too = but even for us politicos, it is much more interesting watching a film about the party's policy on climate change than it is sitting down and reading a policy briefing that contains the same information.

If these techniques help make policy more interesting and digestible, that's good news for everyone. A similar example is the party's campaign against Labour's insistence on building a large-scale database of DNA records of innocent people. There's an important case to make that this is bad news for innocent people - in answer to that old saw, yes innocent people do have something to fear from Labour's plans. But I suspect more people will find it easy to sit down and listen to Nick Clegg's webcast on the site on the subject than will read my lovingly-crafted words in a Liberator article on the same subject.

Love it or hate it - moving pictures and sounds are often much softer on the mind and easier to digest than reading the written word!

Francis Maude: Denies shady dealings
The announcement from Conservative Party Chairman Francis Maude held little hint of the fincancial background. On 27 September he announced a series of property moves, including this

The Party continues to own 32 Smith Square, having recently purchased the freehold of Smith Square and the adjoining 67 Tufton Street, and is continuing to review options on its future use.

But this transaction had already made the papers back in August when the Observer reported that

in recent weeks the party has been negotiating to sell the freehold to their historic headquarters in Smith Square, together with adjoining offices in Tufton Street, for an estimated £30m. Yet they acquired the freeholds on both properties in March this year for £15.56m, after obtaining a loan from the Allied Irish Bank.
Tory officials have declined to reveal the identities of either the businessmen who sold Smith Square to them in March or any company in the process of purchasing it.

Now it is back in the news. In a wide-ranging on Tory fundraising, the Independent on Sunday names Christopher Moran as one of those involved in the transaction:

Christopher Moran

A key Tory supporter. He throws his London home, Crosby Hall, open for Conservative Party events and was recently made a director of the Tories' property company, C&UCO Properties Ltd. He was expelled from Lloyds in 1982 for 'discreditable conduct'.

According to the Independent on Sunday, C&UCO Properties Ltd holds the leasehold to 32 Smith Square on behalf of the Conservative Party. (There is more on Moran on the Sunday Times Rich List.)

The Sunday Times is investigating similar issues. It names Lord Salisbury (a tory peer on leave of absence form the House of Lords as a protest against having to declare financial interests) as one of those involved in "a trust that helps to bankroll the Conservative party from properties that it owns".

The article claims that the "party accepts money from a number of unknown or obscure organisations, trusts and companies — devices, it is claimed, that are used to avoid public scrutiny of donors."

Now the Sunday Telegraph is getting interested and says that the Tories "claim not to know who sold them two Westminster properties in a multi-million pound property transaction being investigated by the Electoral Commission".
Smith Square: At the centre of speculation
The Telegraph says that C&UCO Properties have acquired the freehold to buildings in Smith Square and Tufton Streetby taking control of an offshore company "Platinum Overseas Holdings, a mysterious offshore company based in the British Virgin Islands".

All this has led to Francis Maude having to make some further statements

Francis Maude, the Conservatives Party's chairman, said the party did not know who the owners of Platinum were. He said the sale of Platinum was conducted by Citigroup, the investment bank. However, Citigroup sources told The Sunday Telegraph that they were "unable to find anyone who is aware of this transaction" at the bank.

"It was a very commercial transaction," Mr Maude said, adding: "It is not a hidden donation."

The Electoral Commission might take some convincing of this. In the meantime it seems clear that the use of overseas companies has enabled the Conservatives to avoid a stamp duty bill of more than a quarter of a million pounds.

There cannot be a £20 note lying on the pavement because somebody would have picked it up. Equally there cannot be a better way to tax, that doesn't have some hidden problem, or a government would have already adopted it. Journalists doing their job will be looking for the hidden problem that green taxes suffer. (The lazy ones will metaphorically put their fingers in their ears whenever the environment is mentioned, and emote their preference for SUVs.)

The obvious hidden problem for green taxes to have is that if they work, they will raise less revenue. Obvious, but in most cases quite wrong.

In a growing economy, if we want to levy enough tax merely to stabilise emissions, the levy will have to increase over time as society gets richer and willing to spend more money on whatever benefit the dirty process brings. This is increasing eco-tax revenues over time and stabilising emissions. That is a big benefit to both the treasury and the environment.

You could argue that only stabilising emissions is not really changing behaviour, it is not really a success. I think for most pollutants, and for carbon dioxide in particular, stabilisation, without harming prosperity, would be a big success and set a powerful example internationally. Perhaps the levels of green taxes the Lib Dems are proposing aren't even enough to stabilise emissions in which case the argument that they will lead to falling revenues has no merit whatever.

But let's suppose the idea really caught on, and we had such swingeing increases in eco-taxes that carbon emissions started to fall. Would this then cause us a problem in balancing the books? Would these increases mean falling revenues? Well no. Taxing 90 tonnes of something at £20 per tonne will raise more than taxing 100 tonnes at £10 per tonne. The tax rate at which revenues actually start to fall is much higher than the rate at which the level of emissions will stabilise and start to fall.

The demand for energy is, at current prices, still relatively inelastic. Most of us do not worry about the cost of energy when getting in the car or using domestic appliances. The downside may well be that reductions in emissions are hard to achieve, but the upside is that the potential for eco taxes to raise revenue is much higher. And as we raise eco-taxes, we cut taxes on work. Now it is possible that substituting one tax for another will hurt prosperity, but not to the same order of magnitude as raising extra taxes. And in this case we are taxing work less, so we should expect a positive effect on prosperity.

If you believe there can't be a £20 note lying on the pavement, you won't try to pick one up if you think you see it. And if lots of people believe the same, it is quite easy for the note to remain on the pavement for quite some time. Magician Derren Brown famously left a wallet overflowing with £50 notes on a pavement in a busy shopping street for most of the day, the only protection being a yellow circle painted round it. The impossibility theorem is proved wrong by finding the impossible thing and taking the benefit. That's the Green Tax Switch.

President Gore... and other things that never happened
ed. Duncan Brack
pub. Politico's/ Methuen, 25 September 2006

by Phil Grant

This book's predecessor, Prime Minister Portillo, a collection of speculations in counterfactual political history, was an immense pleasure (albeit in some parts a guilty one - one thinks of Iain Dale's cheery wish-fulfilment piece that gave the volume its title and amused, in its different ways, Tories and non-Tories alike). President Gore succeeds in being for the most part entertaining and thought-provoking, and often both at once.

Duncan Brack now takes over in full the editorial reins which he previously shared with Dale. Though this is certainly not a narrowly liberal exercise, it will certainly appeal to Liberal Democrats. Brack, a stalwart of Lib Dem conference committees and editor of the Journal of Liberal History, has contributed an excellent piece in its own right (What if the Alliance had not quarrelled publicly over defence in 1986?) which brings across the urgent frustration of someone who was there at the time. He has also used his contacts to commission a range of contributors with Lib Dem links - nearly half the authors included here are associated with the party or with the study of Liberal history.

Counterfactual history perhaps has a natural pull for Liberal Democrats, with the agonising thought that the decline of the 1920s might have been much more contingent and less inevitable than a class-conflict analysis of British politics implies. And, more recently, suppose - as Robert Waller did in PMP - that the Alliance had come second in the popular vote in 1983?

Accordingly, several of these essays explore how the party system could have become aligned differently. We explore how the moderate and radical forces of left and right could have combined differently in the Victorian period; the possibility of Joseph Chamberlain and his allies sticking (or returning) to the Liberal fold; and Labour as a twentieth-century fringe party rendered irrelevant by a broad Liberal party of the centre-left. All of these scenarios are rendered plausibly, at least in their broad outlines.

Those essays which focus on individual personalities tend to win out both in credibility (who's to say that someone couldn't have acted that way?) and in simple enjoyment. Liberator's tireless pamphleteer David Boyle ingeniously has Beatrice Potter marrying not Sidney Webb but Joseph Chamberlain, though the piece moves a little too smoothly to a present-day Britain (and Ireland) exactly as Boyle would wish it to be. And Labour maverick R. J. Briand ventriloquises Neil Kinnock as a lovable, candid survivor of a hellish and brief 1991 Premiership.

Where the scope moves beyond Britain, we are on less certain shores. In perhaps the best essay of the collection (What if Czechoslovakia had fought in 1938?), Helen Szamuely's careful analysis of historical fact does not hold her back from exploring the alternatives. York Membery, however, as he imagines a world where Franz Ferdinand escaped assassination, is too cautious to venture far beyond the platitude that "the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s would almost certainly have been a happier, more prosperous place." John Nichols, in the title piece, is surely correct that Gore would have been better off attacking a pattern of disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida rather than the technicalities of the count, but probably overestimates the Republicans' sense of shame and readiness to concede.

A brief whinge is in order about the quality of copy-editing. There are several jarring but trivial typos, and a few outright howlers. The Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell becomes "O'Connor"; Andrew Bonar Law is rechristened "Arthur"; and an imagined flight by Mao from British West Africa to Brazil carries him over the Pacific. These mar a serious-looking and austerely presented book, and ought at least to be corrected for the paperback edition.

Nonetheless, President Gore is warmly recommended as a book that will leave its readers stimulated and, perhaps, optimistic that the future is out there to be changed.

A really interesting and enjoyable article, but I do have several reservations about it's line of reasoning - and indeed the HoL select committee's.

Firstly, at no stage is it made clear in concrete terms why it is preferable for parliament should be consulted before war or a troop deployment. It is just assumed that transfering power from the executive to the legislature must be a 'good thing', and therefore the current arrangement constitutes an abnormality. In fact, I would argue that the conduct of warfare is highly suited to executive decision making and highly unsuited to 'decision by committee' because above all, the prosecution of war needs timely, bold, decisive, and clear cut decisions. As Winston Churchill once said: 'Put the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, and the most audacious soldier at the table together, and what do you get? The sum of their fears.' Gallant, intrepid and audacious are not words which spring to mind when thinking of our current crop of legislators, and quite frankly, I am concerned that the sum of their fears might well be so pusillanimous that we would soon cease to play an effective role in international affairs altogether.

But there is another problem. Governments like John Major's on very slender majorities are at the mercy of minority interest MPs. Suppose that a serious escalation in loyalist violence in Northern Ireland had occured during the 1990s. The Major government is briefed by military commanders and republican politicans that a drastic increase in troop numbers is needed to halt the crisis. But who is the government reliant on to support its domestic agenda?
Ulster Unionist MPs! There is a serious danger that Britain's responses to international events become pawns or bargaining chips in the domestic political game if parliamentary influence is increased, to the detriment of a consistent or appropriate foreign policy.

There is also the quality of MPs themselves. It has been frequently commented on that practically none of them have any real experience in foreign affairs, and only a tiny percentage have any experience of the Armed Forces or the events that they would be pontificating about. Whether from right or left, there is a tendency to sermonise, score party points and build careers. Fine when debating about the pros and cons of something relatively unimportant like hunting with dogs, less so when lives and the security of the nation may be at stake. From my point of view, the case has just not been made strongly enough about why parliament as an institution is the correct one to be making decisions about war fighting.

Secondly, these proposals relate to events and procedures leading up to the most recent invasion of Iraq which is generally judged to have been mis-managed. MPs and the Media have felt miffed that they were disregarded over the decision to go to war. However, regarding the MPs, the question really is whether they would have done anything different from the executive when the question: 'To go to War?' was put to the HoC vote on 18th March 2003. The rather embarrassing answer for MPs is actually, NO, in spite of a rebellion there was a crushing majority on favour of both motions on the war in February and March. From my perspective, this knocks out another prop from the parliamentary case, because in fact our legislators were shown to have no better judgement on troop deployment than the much criticised executive.

So, in summary I believe that Parliament has serious case to answer before it is entrusted with any fresh legislative powers, and that so far its powers of judgement have not been especially impressive.
In fact, for the reasons outlined above in point one, it may well be institutionally incapable of offering the kind of quality and speed of decision making that is so vital in the conduct of international affairs.

This was originally posted as a comment, but deserves a wider audience. I believe James posts on Inner West Central but it is a common name, I suppose).

The Monarch is specifically excluded from keeping a standing army during peacetime without the authority of Parliament (Article 6, Bill of Rights 1688) and so, every five years, a new Armed Forces Act is passed, which renews the Army Act 1955, the Air Force Act 1955 and the Naval Discipline Act 1957.
The power to deploy these forces (hereafter “the deployment power�) is, however, a prerogative power still vested in the Crown, and exercised by convention by the Prime Minister. It is arguably the greatest power a government can exercise, placing the lives of its citizens in danger and putting the country itself at risk from a direct attack. Yet the deployment power is also one which governments can exercise without reference to Parliament.

At the end of last month, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Constitution released their report Waging war: Parliament's role and responsibility (hereafter “Waging War�), which examined this lacuna in the government’s legitimacy.
This followed the House of Commons vote on the commitment of troops in Iraq in 2003 and the 2004 House of Commons’ Public Administration Select Committee report which recommended that “any decision to engage in armed conflict should be approved by Parliament, if not before military action then as soon as possible afterwards�.
The report, after discussing the options available to Parliament to give it a greater say in troop deployment, recommended:

“there should be a parliamentary convention determining the role Parliament should play in making decisions to deploy force or forces outside the United Kingdom to war, intervention in an existing conflict or to environments where there is a risk that the forces will be engaged in conflict.�

In this article I will examine whether a new convention is the best device to tackle this complex constitutional problem, considering whether it would be binding and questioning whether an option not considered by the committee, an amendment to the standing orders of both Houses, might be more appropriate.

Are constitutional conventions binding?

What is a constitutional convention? The most commonly accepted definition was given by Dicey:

“They [Conventions] will be found… to possess one common quality or property; they are all, or at any rate most of them, rules for determining the mode in which the discretionary powers of the Crown … ought to be exercised.�

He goes on to state that these rules are not “laws at all since they are not enforced by the Courts.�
Do constitutional conventions bind those who operate them, either morally or practically? Dicey asserted that certain constitutional conventions bound those that operate them, as should they decide not to obey them they will soon find themselves in breach of the law. To support his assertion, he theorised on what would happen if there was a breach of the convention that Parliament is summoned once a year. He stated that the Finance Act could not be passed and so “large portions of the revenue would cease to be legally due and could not be legally collected, whilst every official, who acted as collector, would expose himself to actions or prosecutions�. However, there are some rules that have been regarded as constitutional conventions in the past, but no longer are, such as the convention that the Table Office of the House of Commons refused to allow a written parliamentary question to a minister to be tabled if the minister had earlier refused to answer it.
Other conventions have been “suspended� so that for a period of time they do not operate. The most notable time this occurred was in 1975, when the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, announced to the House of Commons that the convention of collective Cabinet responsibility was to be suspended:

“Those Ministers who do not agree with the Government’s recommendation in favour of continued membership of the European Community are, in the unique circumstances of the referendum, now free to advocate a different view during the referendum campaign in the country.�

Several Cabinet Ministers went on to take advantage of this, campaigning for a “No� vote.
Some conventions have been described as being “weakened� over the passage of time. Jowell and Oliver suggested that that ministerial responsibility to Parliament has been “significantly weakened over the last ten years or so ... so that it can no longer be said, in our view, that it is a fundamental doctrine of the constitution�. Does this mean that the doctrine no longer operates at all? The case of Stephen Byers, a Minister that admitted he lied to a House of Commons Select Committee and has to date received no formal sanction for it suggests that it does not.
It is widely accepted that the Monarch cannot in general refuse Royal Assent to a Bill passed by both Houses and this could be considered a binding convention. But what if, as Marshall suggests, the Monarch refused the Royal Assent for a bill purporting to repeal an earlier “entrenched� enactment that had not gone through all the special provisions in that earlier enactment (such as a 2/3 majority in the House of Commons). Would the Monarch then feel bound by the convention? The answer is unclear and will only be answered if such an occasion ever arose. The last time a Monarch contemplated refusing the Assent was in 1913, when the Government of Ireland Bill was going through Parliament.
The answer to whether those that operate the constitution feel bound by its conventions is not clear cut and largely depends on the political situation of the day, but as Jaconelli wrote:

“the party that is in power at the moment respects the constraints that are imposed on it by constitutional conventions in the expectation that the opposition parties, when they attain office, will likewise respect the same constraints.�

This suggests that there is nothing to prevent a nefarious government from ignoring a constitutional convention, if it so felt. This seems unsatisfactory in a democracy, so is judicial intervention possible?
In Madzimbamuto v Lardner Burke the House of Lords recognised a constitutional convention, but refused to endorse it. In 1965 the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia and his colleagues issued a “Declaration of Independence� purporting to declare that Southern Rhodesia was no longer a Crown colony - as it had been since annexation in 1923 - but was an independent sovereign state. The UK Parliament then passed the Southern Rhodesia Act 1965, which stated that “the Government and Parliament of the United Kingdom have responsibility and jurisdiction as heretofore for and in respect of it.� The Act provided that Her Majesty might make “such provision... as appears to Her to be necessary or expedient� by Order in Council. An Order in Council was then passed stating that the Constitution passed by the Southern Rhodesian Parliament was illegal. Southern Rhodesia argued that a constitutional convention existed that the Parliament in Westminster would not legislate for the country without its consent. In his decision, Lord Reid said:

“The learned judges refer to the statement of the United Kingdom Government in 1961… setting out the convention that the Parliament of the United Kingdom does not legislate without the consent of the Government of Southern Rhodesia on matters within the competence of the Legislative Assembly. That was a very important convention but it had no legal effect in limiting the legal power of Parliament.�

The first case where a convention influenced a court in its decision was Attorney General v Jonathan Cape Ltd. In this case, the Attorney-General applied for injunctions against the publishers of a former Cabinet Minister’s diaries to restrain publication of the book in the public interest, and against the publishers of “The Sunday Times� to restrain publication of the book or of extracts from it. One of his arguments was that the diaries would undermine the convention of collective Cabinet responsibility, as it showed that the Cabinet disagreed on matters. In deciding the case, Lord Widgery CJ recognised the convention and said that in cases such as these the existing doctrine of confidentially could apply:

“... there must, however, be a limit in time after which the confidential character of the information, and the duty of the court to restrain publication, will lapse.�

Therefore, he decided publication should go ahead. Whilst the doctrine did not bind the court, it did influence its decision. It’s not possible to find any cases since where the courts decision has been influenced by a constitutional convention, so it’s unclear whether the reasoning in Attorney General v Jonathan Cape Ltd will be followed.
It is there therefore clear from the cases and situations cited that constitutional conventions are not strictly binding on those that operate them and certainly not on the courts of this country.

Would a constitutional convention be a sufficient safeguard against a government with less honourable values than our current one?

In Waging War, the House of Lords rejected statutory oversight of the Crown’s deployment partially on the ground that:

“… the need to provide for “emergency� exceptions would create loopholes that could be readily exploited by a future administration with ambitions less benign than those to which we are accustomed.�

Yet then went on to endorse the creation of a new constitutional convention which, as I have shown, is even more capable of being exploited by “less benign� government as it has no enforcement machinery whatsoever.
As the committee pointed out, a statute laying out the framework in which the deployment power can be used is not desirable, as this would lead to judicial review and in areas of “high policy� the courts are reluctant to get involved in matters which are largely political decisions. It is therefore clear that if the deployment power was placed on a statutory basis, it would be met with hostility by judges not willing to cross the boundary between the judiciary and the government.
However, there must be, as the House of Lords argued, democratic oversight of the decision to deploy troops to provide both legitimacy and legality to the power. A constitutional convention, as shown above, would not hold the government to account as they could, on a whim, choose to ignore it, so is there another way of ensuring Parliament has a role in taking arguably the most serious decision a country can make.

Another solution: Standing Orders?

The standing orders of Parliament (and each House has its own standing orders) are the rules under which Parliament conducts its business. They have not traditionally been used to control government in any substantive way, however, there is nothing specifically preventing them from being amended. It could be amended to give the Speaker of either House, acting either on an instruction from the government, the opposition, a petition from 100 MPs or on his own initiative, the power to hold a vote on whether to deploy troops or whether a deployment taken under “emergency conditions� should continue. The penalty for a government that failed to follow the decision of both Houses (if both Houses voted the same way) would be the suspension of all members of government from the House for an indefinite period.
It is admitted that this solution is not ideal, as both Houses could vote differing ways but the deterrent effect alone would probably ensure no government would undertake any troop deployment without a vote in Parliament.

Conclusion

The deployment of our armed forces without parliamentary approval is a severe gap in our constitutional framework in a country that prides itself on its democratic tradition. It is accepted that a deployment power statute could lead to unnecessary challenges by judicial review to future deployment, and should therefore be avoided. However, the solution favoured by the House of Lords’ Constitution Committee does not offer sufficient safeguards against future governmental abuse. The compromise put forward in this article does and should be welcomed as a necessary limit on the power of the Crown.

Despite the terrible disruption of yesterday the media have picked up on the Lib Dems' tax proposals, and are giving us some reasonable coverage - with the exception of the Independent who, as you will see below seem to be ploughing a bit of a lone furrow, or taking their line from conservative commentators. Here's a run down of the ones I've seen so far and then my take on the paper and the way forward till conference.

The BBC so far seems the most positive, concentrating mostly on the fact that up to two million people would come out of income tax and national insurance completely and presenting quite a benign picture of the size of the "green" taxes, especially on cars. If you are going to save a couple of thousand on income tax, do you really mind then paying £850 instead of £150 a year to run your Ford Mondeo?

The Guardian gives us a little snippet, again quite positive and focussing on the benefits to the lower earners who could come out of tax completely and the fact that the higher rate of income tax, still 40% as now, would not kick in till earnings reached £50,000 per year - reversing some of Gordon Brown's "fiscal drag" of only having raised the higher rate threshold in line with inflation and not earnings.

The Independent gives it a bumpier ride, seeming to want to portray those who will lose out as the vast bulk of the middle classes. It seems that we've been over this ground before. In "Just whose pips will squeak" I responded to a similar nonsense from Iain Dale where he was trying to make out that a huge number of middling income households would end up paying for the cuts at the lower end. In summary, the changes to Capital Gains Tax allowances and Pensions Savings allowances would affect mostly the top one and top ten per cent of the working population - people who, between them, own around 60% of all the financial wealth in the UK. It seems a reasonable price to pay for removing four times that number of people from income tax completely and reducing the overall burden for the majority of the remainder.

Incidentally, the Independent ought to note also that the Tory Bow Group suggestions published last month, remove all pensions savings relief on annual amounts of greater than £4,400 - a significantly deeper cut than ours affecting many more people a little.

The politics.co.uk web site gives a much more balanced review, highlighting prominently that we "would tax the rich and polluters to pay for huge tax cuts for the majority" - possibly the most radical aspect of the plan that the Independent neglects to mention: "cutting the basic rate of income tax by two per cent; raising the income needed to pay higher-rate tax to £50,000 removing 1.3 million people from the top band; raising the nil-tax threshold by around £2,500 to £7,185; and raising national insurance thresholds in line with income tax".

All of these (except politics.co.uk) highlight the possibility that the Tax Commission proposals may face a difficult time at party conference (unlike other parties we do at least have a democratic process at conference to adopt important policy like this, so it could yet change).

Evan Harris - clearly his science spokesman brief does not require much of an understanding of the "dismal science" - is leading the charge to retain the largely symbolic 50 pence top rate of tax (and which because of capping NI and Local Income Tax never really was a 50 pence rate when it came down to it). And then there are people like myself, land value taxers to the core, who would like to have seen us go much further towards our 1998 policy ambition of shifting taxation away from people, their incomes and savings, trade and profit, and much more onto resource use and especially land and economic rent.

It's all not as clear cut as it makes out though. There will still be losers even amongst those on lower incomes, as James Graham argues.

But the big battles ahead are likely to be over the 50% rate, and conference has been given a choice on this, as well as a proposal for a new national property tax that some of us see as paving the way for our Land Value Tax as soon as the work is done to show how it can be implemented. I hope both get at least as much attention in the debates now and at conference.

Potential supporters of Harris's demand to retain some headline grabbing "we're more socialist than you" 50% rate (and to increase the threshold at which it kicks in to an almost meaningless £150,000 of annual income) need to remember that it is peoples' surplus incomes - what they've got left when they've paid their living costs each year, their "profit" if you like - that gets salted away as capital wealth. They use the loopholes and complexities we want to correct to minimise their income tax bills anyway. We are likely to collect significantly more from such people by going for their accumulating wealth than their headline incomes. It is this surplus to requirements that has given them the massive advantage of owning such a huge proportion of the national wealth.

For me - I think we should be much less specific and talk much more of the direction of taxation policy. Whilst we have to be able to show that we can fund our aspirations for public spending through the different taxes we propose, producing illustrative numbers now, or even specific rates, leaves us hostages to the fortunes of the economy between now and any General Election for a start, and probably much longer before we are ever in a position to implement any of it.

Unsurprisingly then, I would much rather we set out that we would like to enable more people to make their own way in life through work and savings by cutting taxes on incomes and capital accumulation much more deeply. Transferring the burden to land, economic rent and resource use will greatly help in spreading economic prosperity around the country and begin to enable us to reduce the vast payments government currently transfers from economically successful areas to less economically successful areas. We could keep up the same sort of levels of spending on capital and infrastructure projects if that is what we want to do and on quality public services, whilst a reducing dependence on benefits allows us to cut the overall tax burden.

But we can only hope to produce these effects if we start pointing the way now. In recent weeks and months commentators from all sides of the political spectrum have begun to take things like land value tax more seriously, from the Institute of Economic Affairs and Country Life editors, to Will Hutton. If it's an idea whose time has come, then political parties need to grasp it and start to explain it to people. The potential benefits we claim for it are enormous. Much more significant than haggling over whether we want to send a signal that we still view those who work hard as "the enemy" to be fleeced if we can. It could give us the sort of political advantage of promoting a radical shift in the way the tax system works and what it sets out to achieve as Thatcher had with monetarism leading up to 1979. Of standing out from the increasingly monotone crowd.

Fairer, Greener, Simpler - Land Value tax meets all three better than anything in the current offering.

The author is Hon Sec of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land-value Taxation and Economic Reform), but writes here in a personal capacity.

I’ve spent the last few days musing on the question of immigration, emigration and migration. As John Reid said this very morning, it’s a subject that needs to be discussed without accusations of racism thrown around like confetti.

It’s a serious issue and possibly the most contentious at the moment. How should liberals respond to the many challenges migration presents and the fears, both real and imagined that it provokes among very many people? Parties like the BNP and, to some degree, the Conservatives, shamefully play on these fears and seek to create perceptions of economic breakdown and social collapse in order to scare people into voting for them. In this, they are all often aided and abetted by a media that is quick to condemn migrants but slow to recognise the economic and cultural value and legacy they have brought to this country.

Let’s make no bones about it – British history is largely a history of migration and movement from the Saxons who invaded in the last days of the Roman Empire through to the Vikings, the Normans, the Huguenots escaping religious persecution and the huge movements of population that occurred in the 20th Century.

Many thousands of people, forced to flee Nazi persecution, came to Britain in the 1930s and parts of west London bear witness to an earlier Polish migration following the conquest of that country in 1939. After 1945, Europe saw an enormous upheaval of people, many forced west by the Russians. However, we shouldn’t forget either that the United States also introduced stricter immigration laws after the war which precluded many from the Caribbean going there for work. With the traditional routes of migration from Eastern Europe closed by the Iron Curtain, Britain looked to new sources for the cheap labour that was so desperately needed in the 1950s. Workers from the Caribbean came by the thousand with their families and settled and changed the face of Britain forever.

Even after that, later arrivals from the Indian Sub-Continent and Africa have played their part in shaping the dynamic that is Britain. The fact is English-ness or British-ness isn’t something set in stone or something that can be refined until it shines like a diamond in a museum. On the contrary, to be English or British is to understand, recognise and accept an evolving, dynamic culture and society. To close the door or turn back on such influences would lead inexorably to stagnation and decline.

In my view, history will regard the seminal event of the last fifty years as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism from 1989-91. Even now, nearly a generation later, thinkers and politicians alike struggle with the reverberations of these events. After more than forty years of enforced economic and social isolation, millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe became free. That freedom wasn’t just of course political but economic, social and cultural. They achieved what we in Britain had largely taken for granted – freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

In the rush to embrace these newly liberated countries, many, including us, failed to see beyond “peace dividends� to what this would mean for the future of Europe. To their credit, Mrs Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand, though ostensibly prisoners of their past, were more cautious about a re-unified Germany.

Politically, the last 15 years have been mixed for the countries of Eastern Europe. Democracy is taking root but very often extremists have done well such as in Poland now or in those countries where the Communists, under another name, have regained the power they previously enjoyed with the aid of the Red Army.

In Britain, Conservatives saw the newly emerging parties in countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as allies against the Franco-German Axis that seemed to dominate the EU. I well remember (and we should not cease to remind the electorate) Conservatives in the mid-90s arguing for the enlargement of the EU to bring in countries like Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. This was done not for benevolent but for politically pragmatic reasons. In the Conservative view, not only then but also I suspect now, France, Germany and Italy were set on a course for deeper economic and political integration within the “old� EU. Political union seemed only a matter of time but by including a raft of new countries, such a process would be delayed if not completely abandoned.

These were, of course, the Conservatives who believed the Euro would collapse within months and that economic union would be a disaster (just ask Ireland).

In a free-trade environment such as that proposed by the Conservatives, freedom of trade went hand-in-hand with free movement of capital and free movement of labour. As countries accede to the EU, their populations are allowed the same rights to live and work in the EU that we enjoy. Given the average wage in London compared with that in Gdansk or Krakow and it’s hardly surprising to see Poles migrating here in the thousands. The accession of countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia isn’t going to improve things. Whether as penniless refugees or economic migrants, the net effect is the same – a major movement of population from east to west and from south to north.

So, how do we respond? I live in East Ham, about as cosmopolitan as you can get with over 40% of the population from ethnic minorities and an area already dubbed “little Poland�. It has been fascinating to see the Poles displace the Tamils and Bengalis who displaced the Anglo-Saxon white population before them. The area IS improving – houses are being refurbished and then re-let to Poles, Albanians and others. Is there tension – yes, but it’s no worse than elsewhere. The strain is on public services such as doctors, dentists, chiropodists and others. The local schools have faced an influx of Polish children and all the time there’s the worry that the BNP in next-door Barking & Dagenham will seek to make political capital. I suspect that within the second-generation Tamil and Bengali communities there is acute concern at the arrival of new migrants but the racist BNP won’t be the conduit for that concern. It may go to a party like Respect or it may go elsewhere.

In a global world, there is now what I consider a “crisis of identity�. The allegiances to the football club, the waving of flags, the almost frantic desire to want to belong to a group are all symptoms of a sense of dislocation as is, I think, abstention from the political process. The really hard part of politics is challenging and changing ingrained attitudes and behaviours especially when the media reinforces these attitudes on an almost daily basis.

Is there an answer? Good old-fashioned community politics is all I have to offer at this time. Where local representatives know and understand the problems and dynamics, the behaviours and identity of their community they are best able to understand and alleviate the concerns of people. National and even regional Government is too remote to tackle this.

I have come increasingly to the conclusion that no party and no Government can have all the answers for everyone on one platform. As we have seen when discussing tax, any proposal has both winners and losers and it’s the losers who shout the loudest. Migration is the same – the noise of the fears and the concerns outweigh the clear and indisputable benefits. Without the replenishment of the pool of cheap labour that migration provides, we would all suffer. Structurally, there are problems with the capacity of local services to deal with sudden influxes of population in some areas but overall migration is positive. People come in bringing skills and ideas. They work, earn money, spend and send money back to their countries of origin.

British people have also benefited from the opening of Eastern Europe, as anyone watching property programmes will tell you. How many thousands of British people have bought land or buildings in Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia and elsewhere, driving up the prices and forcing the locals out of the market? Of course, in time, market forces will provide a solution of sorts, driving up costs and wages in Eastern Europe until it is no longer viable to come to Britain to work.

As has been witnessed in China, economic development can have dramatic social, cultural, political and environmental consequences. I suspect that an emerging Eastern European market will draw in people from Russia, the Caucasus, Turkey and elsewhere and one day Africa will be the beneficiary as it will be the last source of cheap labour on the planet. Of course, if we haven’t solved the resourcing and environmental issues, it won’t matter anyway.

So, then, where does that leave liberals? As long-time supporters of freedom, including freedom of movement, thought, capital and labour, we cannot and must not join the bandwagon of those seeking to cap, control or halt immigration or migration. The Britain that we live in today is the consequence of migration. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland are all the stories of population movement and the consequences thereof. If we are relaxed about what it is to be British and accept that it is an evolving, dynamic “thing�, then we accept and welcome the contribution to that sense of being British that migrants bring. We may not always understand or even like migrant culture but as liberals, we welcome the diversity that it brings. We have to say that we will not be “less British� through migration but, if anything, “more British�. Of course, we must ensure that the social infrastructure exists and if that means employing qualified medical professionals from abroad, fine. If it means Government funding to local authorities and PCTs to set up more schools and healthcare facilities, so be it.

Above all, liberals have always stood foursquare against fear and ignorance. Too much of the immigration/migration debate is based on that fear and ignorance which has enabled the BNP to flourish. We need to fight in local Councils and in Parliament to expose that fear and ignorance and to challenge the assertions of groups like Migrationwatch. We also need to expand the debate to consider the hundreds of thousands who leave Britain every year often to go to France, Italy or Spain where, having often voted for lower taxes and cuts in public spending here, they go to get better-funded public services.

Finally, as internationalists, we need to bring the whole question of migration into the international arena and work with other Governments and agencies so it isn’t a matter of shuffling people from one unwelcoming country to the next seeing which country can appease its electorate by taking in fewest people and that means talking to liberals in other countries about migration and how it can be managed.

Well, those are my ramblings, what do other people think?

Stodge is a Lib Dem activist living in East Ham

Back in the days of John Smith my boss, a long-standing Conservative, gave up on his party. He thought that the Labour Party had a young fresh politician who offered the country something new. Smith was a decent man, he believed. But the next generation would take the party forward to greater things.

The politician he had in mind was Gordon Brown - and there are times when you can imagine Brown shuffling around in his old age saying "I could have been a contender...". It is clear that if Brown could have beaten Blair he would have taken him on. But he couldn´t and didn´t, and got on with running the country while Blair tried to run the world.

But more than a decade after those conversations with my boss, we don´t know much more about Brown.

Brown spent his first years in the Treasury implementing one great Liberal democrat policy (independence for the MPC) and gaining a reputation for prudence. He inherited a pretty benign economic environment. But he has more or less buried the old line that Labour could not take power without a sterling crisis. Yet Brown has been much less of an "economic" Chancellor than most of his predecessors (and quite how much has he delegated to Ed Balls?) but more of a social policy chancellor than any other.

Public Finance has a long article reviewing the Brown record. It is a pretty impartial account, and worth reading.

The would-be prime minister has moved well beyond the confines of the traditional chancellor’s role. When he leaves the Treasury, his performance will doubtless be measured by the economic balance sheet. But he will leave a legacy of social welfare policy, too. Brown is heavily associated with the government’s pledges on child poverty: to reduce it by 25% by 2005, halve it by 2010 and eradicate it by 2020. And flagship government social policies such as tax credits, the Sure Start early years programme and child trust funds all emanated from the Treasury and bear his fingerprints.

The chancellor’s wider policy role has come with a dose of ideology too: measures such as tax credits and Sure Start are based on a philosophy of ‘progressive universalism’ – everyone benefits, but the poorest gain the most. Brown is also an advocate of ‘asset-based welfare’ – the idea that boosting assets as well as income helps reduce relative disadvantage.

So - aside from economic stability (which has been pretty widespread through most of the years since 1997) - the Brown legacy consists of three policies that have not been terribly popular or successful - and which involve the State getting intimately involved with the family.

They are all intended to do good though. And it is debatable how far any incoming Government is going to move away from them:

The Conservatives fully intend to retain tax credits ‘in one form or another’, says shadow paymaster-general Mark Francois.

‘We’ve come to the conclusion that tax credits need to be reformed and made simpler to administrate and operate so they can continue to provide assistance to those people who need it – but without driving them to distraction in the process.’

In practice they are not going to be scrapped without replacement- so reform rather than abolition seems likely.

And yet they are - increasingly - massively affected by fraud and error. This is from a separate report in Public Finance

Every household in Britain is losing around £180 per year because of fraud and error in the government’s benefit and tax credits systems, figures released by opposition MPs this week suggest.

A series of reports into Chancellor Gordon Brown’s flagship tax credits regime this week revealed that fraud and error in the system was as high as £1.28bn in 2003/04.

But Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman David Laws estimated that total losses through the welfare system had reached around £4.3bn annually - £180 per household.

Speaking to Public Finance on the eve of the Revenue and Customs department’s announcements on July 11, Laws said that tax credits losses had reached ‘abhorrent’ and ‘unjustifiable’ levels.

Sure Start has also had a pretty chequered history. An evaluation last year showed that it could not be shown to have had any positive impact. Public Finance reports that

The Sure Start scheme has won friends – and attracted criticism too. Aimed at bringing together health, education and support for parents to help young children in deprived areas, the programme has been rapidly expanded. But with the expansion, the partnership-run schemes will now become part of council-run children’s centres.

The latest pledge is to expand from around 850 schemes to 3,500 children’s centres by 2010. So it was something of a blow when the national evaluation of Sure Start, carried out by Birkbeck College’s Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, revealed last month that the most deprived children had actually been negatively affected by the scheme.

A damning conclusion one would have thought. But not clear-cut because

Sure Start’s supporters argue that early years support is a long-term means of tackling deprivation. Reports of its failure are ‘very premature and misguided’, says CPAG’s Kate Green. It is a ‘brilliant, very bold, important initiative’ that will prove to have been money well spent, she believes, adding: ‘That’s not to say we don’t think more is needed to get to the hardest to reach families.’

Nick Pearce agrees. ‘Sure Start needs time to mature. We should hold fast to its promise,’ he says. Pearce also suggests that with huge pressure on social services budgets and overstretched social work teams, local authorities ‘have started to roll up some of their most intensive work with families into it’. This reduction in traditional social work support might have contributed to the scheme being less effective, he says.

The team that produced the national evaluation is not rushing to give a final verdict on Sure Start either. Professor Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, begins by praising Sure Start as ‘an important and valuable effort’.

He confirms that the evaluation found ‘among the majority in Sure Start there were small positive effects detectable’, while for ‘a not insubstantial minority there were some adverse effects’. It was ‘apparently the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged who had the most adverse effects’.

But he adds an important caveat. ‘Mostly, there were no detectable effects.’ The projects were studied when they were semi-embedded, he points out. ‘People expect to change the course of mighty rivers overnight. In some ways, expectations have been unrealistically raised... certainly among the chattering classes.’

I tend to the old fashioned view that if you spend a lot of money, you expect something to show for it. But you will certainly find Liberal Democrats who support Sure Start. Personally I see worrying links with the Child Surveillance measures chronicled by Dave Hill.

On asset-based welfare I have more sympathy for the instrument (people should own things). But the policy amounts to Child Trust Funds - and this is a squib of a programme. The assets provided are pretty meaningless - and at their current scale the scheme is not justifiable. The argument Public Finance report is that Child Trust Funds are more of a contribution to a savings culture than to social policy. Which takes back to the economy, because one thing we certainly do not have in the UK at present is much of a savings culture. It seems we expect Brown to be prudent on our behalf.

I expect Labour to get a bounce when Brown takes over (I can´t see there being any other outcome). And I expect him to unveil a number of new policy initiatives (constitutional, international) to win favourable headlines. But we are not going to see a fresh face on which to pin our hopes. We will have been living in Brown´s Britain for the best part of a decade.

Conclusion?

He´ll cut and run.