In Tony Blair’s day, New Labour were the masters of spin – at their most effective when they did it so convincingly that we didn’t even realise the facts were being spun, or else we were led to believe that we could see through the spinning, when in fact that presentation was the intention all along.

Now, it seems, that’s all gone. Yet, oddly, it hasn’t been replaced by the honesty and straightforwardness we were promised – an honesty many would say was incompatible with politics – but rather by terrible attempts at spinning.

Take the Henley by-election: Instead of pointing out that this is a Conservative seat and virtually ignoring electoral defeat, the omnipresent ‘Party Sources’ are mumbling about victory being secured if Labour keep their deposit. They’re saying that anything over 5% is some kind of win. Oh, brother.

And all the while, Harriet Harman is squeezing out plans to support ‘positive discrimination’ – another bizarre New Labour oxymoron. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination – whether or not it’s positive or negative depends on your standpoint. Is selecting a member of an ethnic minority to balance out a sea of white faces still ‘positive discrimination’ if you’re a serial killer, or does this only apply when we’re handing out things perceived as rewards?

The same propsals also, apparently, ‘ban ageism’ – the government pretended to do back in October 2006, as covered on this very site. I note that Ms Harman is bounding about stating that doctors should only refuse treatment to elderly patients on clinical grounds – not on the basis of age. Three points: Firstly, doctors are already required to do their best for patients, regardless of age. Secondly, is age not part of the clinical picture any more? Thirdly, does this mean that twelve year olds should be openly prescribed the contraceptive pill? We wouldn’t want to be discriminating purely on the basis of age.

Ageism goes two ways. Why is it that this government consistently pretends that ageism only represents discrimination against the old, just as they pretend that racial discrimination only represents discrimination against ethnic minorities?

And let’s not forget that much of the economic policy underlying the NHS is based on QALYs – Quality Adjusted Life Years. That is to say that if an operation costs £30,000 but will lengthen someone’s life by 30 years then the cost per year gained is £1,000. Such measures in and of themselves discriminate against older people – an 80 year-old’s life far less likely to be extended by 30 years than a 20 year-old’s.  The same treatment is less likely to be cost effective in the 80 year-old purely because of their age. Is this to be overlooked in future? How is NHS rationing to take place now?

I sincerely hope that this is a crappy proposal put forward to distract us all from Labour’s impending Henley hammering. It’s not the best of ideas, because it shows Labour in a bad light, but perhaps not quite such a bad light as being deeply unpopular.

On the other hand, if this is a serious attempt at law-making, then we’re all clearly doomed.

» Image Credit: Original image created by Graham Richardson, modified under licence

Every indication appears to suggest that Brown is going to give in to the current demonstrations on fuel pricing and – at the very least – further delay October’s increase in fuel duty. This will be unfortunate but necessary damage limitation, and will spin well for, ahem, ‘hard-working families’.

If Gordon had made this announcement as part of his disastrous round of mea culpa interviews a couple of weeks ago – as I said he should – it would’ve worked to move on the news cycle exactly when he needed some movement, it would have been a pre-emptive strike against this kind of protest, and it would have played well to the public at large.

Instead, Mr Brown has decided to hand the press to his critics. The fact that the police decided to intervene earlier today only served to make the protesters more angry, and increase public sympathy towards them.

This is yet another relatively simple political situation for Brown’s team to handle, yet they appear to have failed to manage it effectively.

Many political pundits are already saying it’s impossible for Gordon to win the next election. If he doesn’t get a grip soon, I’ll start believing them.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Rama, modified under licence

Today, new fertility laws are to begin their passage through the House of Commons, with a number of important debates about the current draft text coming up.

Some MPs are unhappy about the lack of a specific mention of fathers in the part of the text regarding suitability for IVF. The current draft has only a provision to ensure that their is an appropriate and stable family environment in which a child can be brought up – the presence of a father-figure is not specified, which is intended to be a correction to a current anomaly.

Currently, fertility legislation states that a father-figure must be identified. However, more recent Equal Rights legislation has superceded this requirement, allowing lesbian couples to have children using bank sperm. It is therefore proposed that the text of the fertility bill should be changed to reflect the reality – failure to correct it would mean that the current state of affairs would be reversed, with lesbian couples unable to have children once again.

Iain Duncan Smith is one of the prime Parliamentary opponents of this amendment. Earlier this week, he told The Observer:

Without fathers, boys join gangs and teenage girls become pregnant

This is obviously something that Mr Duncan Smith believes strongly, as it seems unlikely that he would want to use small-minded, bare-faced mis-truths to offend large swathes of the population who have grown up without fathers unless he had a very good reason to do so.

He surely wouldn’t express such an ignorant view of the causes of teenage pregnancy and urban crime unless his belief was so strong as to think that the end was justified by any means.

And I’m quite sure that he wouldn’t want to leave himself open to accusations of ignorance unless this was a matter which he felt was of critical importance.

Curiously, though, he didn’t believe in the role of fathers strongly enough to support the Employment Bill in 2002 – a Bill which gave fathers far greater entitlement to Paternity Leave.

Nor was his conviction such to compel him to bother to vote on the issue of children conceived through IVF knowing their natural fathers, back in 2004.

And nor did he believe it strongly enough not to vote in favour of the War in Iraq – a war which has left hundreds of British children without fathers, and tens of thousands of Iraqi families fatherless.

If I didn’t know better, I’d suggest this was thinly veiled homophobia from an MP who doesn’t want lesbian couples to be allowed IVF.

Of course, Mr Duncan Smith is far above that, and the fact that he’s voted against Equal Rights legislation time and again lends no weight to the argument: He’s just thinking of the kids.

Of course.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Steve Punter, modified under licence

Gordon Brown’s disastrous round of interviews on Sunday morning merely added fuel to a fire which had already reached an unprecedented temperature at the heart of government. Each and every interview was a complete and utter shambles. Gordon should not have done them. They were a mistake, and they highlight the underlying problem of Brown’s occupation of Number 10 – bad advice.

Either Gordon or his team have failed to realise that Mr Brown is a completely different creature to his predecessor. They need to understand that to succeed as Prime Minister, Mr Brown urgently needs to stop attempting to use Blairite media tactics to tackle Brownite problems.

Gordon is, without doubt, a poor communicator – the public speaking antithesis of Tony. He does not come across with clear, crisp soundbites. He does not portray empathy. He emanates boredom, surliness, and arrogance. A round of mea culpa interviews in the face of electoral defeat was not the right call.

Agreeing to appear on every political programme going made him look desperate. He should have agreed to a single, exclusive interview, probably with Andrew Marr (his is the show which gets both the most viewers and the most dissemination through other media outlets, and that which has the host most sympathetic to Mr Brown).

He should have done the interview on his turf – get Marr to come to Downing Street, and conduct the interview surrounded by the trappings of power, helping to reaffirm Mr Brown’s position as the Prime Minister: He may have had an electoral battering, but he’s still in charge, still working hard for the people, and – ultimately – still in Downing Street. The pilgrimage to the BBC studios made him look unnecessarily weak, and levelled him with his opponents.

No programme in its right mind would have denied this relatively straight-forward rider when trying to negotiate potentially the most politically significant TV interview of the year. Everyone wanted him, and the programmes could – if necessary – have been played off each other. The neutral surroundings would also have helped to get other broadcasters to play the exclusive interview, as it wouldn’t be so clearly exclusive. Or, alternatively, the interview could have been pooled as a further rider.

Yet the surroundings would have only improved a bad situation – Mr Brown’s alienating nature is a bigger problem. He needs to be coached in how to talk to the electorate. I’m sure this is something his team is working to tackle, but drastic solutions are urgently needed.

Firstly, he needs to be banned from using the phrase ‘global economy’. He’s forever talking about it, and it is utterly meaningless to the vast majority of people. I hear nobody in the real world complaining about the state of the world economy – I see teachers striking over pay, people complaining about the rising cost of food, and increasing concern about petrol prices. To communicate effectively with the country at large, Mr Brown needs to frame discussion in these terms – something David Cameron does excellently, and to great effect.

Secondly, he needs to stop talking about himself. That’s a Blairite tactic, which worked brilliantly for Tony as he had the personality to carry it off. Brown doesn’t possess the necessary connection with voters to manage this – he needs to be the professional, distant leader. He needs to let go of the details, lead with big ideas, and communicate these in a commanding way. He’s a leader who needs not sell the ideas to the people, but rather allow the people to see the benefits of the results. Fewer attempts at personality, more attempts at policy. More of the Stalin, less of the Bean.

And that brings us to the other great failure of this interview: The distinct lack of policy. In his single exclusive interview, Mr Brown should have been armed with an arresting announcement – something along the lines of freezing fuel duty increases to help the poor, or even a major reshuffle of the cabinet since ‘the voters have told us things aren’t working’. Pretty much anything would have moved the news cycle forward, and taken the focus away from Mr Brown and the disastrous election.

This approach would have left him open to accusations of being reactionary, which is why I’d favour the former approach rather than the latter. A reactionary reshuffle would probably play well for the Conservatives in terms of painting the Government as ‘panicked’, but a freezing – or cutting – of fuel duty would be such a populist measure that it would be difficult for the Conservatives to land a meaningful punch. With oil prices rising, revenue from fuel duty is rising unexpectedly quickly anyway, so it wouldn’t leave much of a Budgetry hole.

All of these factors represent basic tactical errors, whether on the part of Mr Brown himself or his surrounding advisory team. Either way, this whole electoral defeat – and many of his other ‘crises’ alike – could have been handled much more effectively.

The fact is that Mr Brown could make for an excellent Prime Minister. He’s vastly more intelligent that his predecessor, appears to desperately hunger after ‘doing the right thing’, and he’s deeply principled. All he needs to do is to learn to keep his hands off the details, make snappier decisions (accepting when he gets them wrong), and learn how to better his personal presentation.

In short, he needs better advice.

» Image Credit: Original photograph from the World Economic Forum, modified under licence.

Labour have been hammered across the country in local elections and have lost the Mayoralty of London. Coverage of this result has reached saturation point, and I’m not sure that there’s much I can add.

Last year, with respect to Mr Brown, I predicted

If he continues to crash his way through crisis after crisis, announcing ridiculous policy after ridiculous policy, then the next government of this country will be Conservative.

He’s doing the media rounds tomorrow. In the face of multiple political crises, a failing economy, and an historic election defeat – really, what can he say that will change anything? I expect he has a half-baked plan to announce something impressive to move along the news agenda.

Like much that Mr Brown does, I fully expect it will fail.

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Over the past decade or so, this government has become frighteningly bad when it comes to creating legislation – not just because I disagree with much of it, but also because some of it is just bad. Much of this bad legislation is passed for the supposed purpose of ‘preventing terrorism’. Whatever that really means.

Time and again, this Labour government has passed extreme legislation – some of which has later been found to be in breach of Human Rights – which ministers have claimed will be used only in ‘specific, extreme circumstances’ – or sometimes even at the sole discretion of the Home Secretary of the day. Whoever that might be.

Those laws are, by definition, bad.

Our own history shows us that laws created for a specific purpose but not legislatively restricted for such use will be willfully misused, whether by the same government, a future government, or quick-thinking individuals. You cannot pass a law and then propose not to use it – it’s illogical, dangerous, and unnecessarily restrictive of freedom.

Just this week, a council has been found to be covertly spying on families applying for school places, in order to ensure that they genuinely reside within the catchment area. The government told us that this was ‘anti-terror legislation’ – and, by all accounts, is now shocked at this apparent misuse of the law.

Yet they created the law. They knew that such situations could arise, and actively chose not to restrict use of the legislation. It’s shocking that a government can pass such sloppy legislation, and then not monitor for its misuse or more actively prevent it.

If a government insists on using its powers in such a slapdash fashion and then overriding the due concerns of the House of Laws through the overuse of the Parliament Act, then it can only be considered a bad government – and one which should be removed from power as soon as possible.

» Image Credit: Photograph from my personal collection

There is a scene in The West Wing, part way through Barlett’s campaign for a second term, when Toby Zeigler becomes aggravated by the constant appearance of banners demanding “Barlett for President”, insisting – rightly – that they should declare “Bartlett is President”.

It’s an interesting vignette designed to demonstrate the assumed political truism that the incumbent of any given office automatically has an advantage over any pretender: A fact which is almost always true in politics.

The incumbent should have an advantage, since people inevitably like to vote for something known over something unknown. Political parties all too often forget that people don’t vote on the basis of promises, but on the basis of actions: Telling people you’ll do all of what they want can never rival the power of actually doing some of what they want.

On top of this, the incumbent has the advantage, by default, of being the more Presidential or Prime Ministerial figure – exactly the kind of figure one would want leading a nation, and hence the one most people are likely to vote for. People have great difficulty seeing past superficial appearances, as has been proved so many times in so many fields.

Yet, at times of major political flux, the rules of the game inevitably change. The last such occasion was 1997, a seminal year in many spheres and hence unsurprisingly a seminal year in the political world as well. People had become tired of a government which itself had become tired, and of a Prime Minister who really had little more to do.

Compare this with Tony Blair’s two election victories as Prime Minister. He was able to compare the state of the nation at the time of the election with the pre-1997 state of the nation, and make a convincing argument for improvement. He could cherry pick his greatest achievements and promised to build upon them. He had the incumbent’s advantage, and it served him well.

Yet now, in 2008, Labour’s greatest achievements no longer resonate. We’ve tired of hearing of the New Deal, the minimum wage is old news, and NHS reform has been done to death. It seems like this government has nothing new to do – it’s done it all before, and we’re comparing Labour’s current promises with Labour’s previous delivery. The ‘bad old days’ of the Tories have slipped from the public conciousness, and it’s now very difficult for Gordon Brown to make a case for Labour’s successes without comparing to Labour’s previous failings.

Indeed, even systemic failures of government – such as the recent furore over MP’s expenses – now enter the public conciousness as failings of Labour by default, as they are in government, even though they are often cross-party failings which should tar the Parliamentary machinery as a whole. Labour, as the party of government, gets all of the negative publicity, yet very little positive publicity for reform work since it appears that most of it is already underway. There are few earth-shattering initiatives left to announce, and the media quickly tire of reporting ongoing work.

The fact is that David Cameron now has the advantage. He’s able to point out the failings of the Labour government without having to defend the failings of previous Conservative governments. In many ways, this moving forward of the agenda is his greatest achievement to date.

David Cameron is now able to play the ‘one of us’ card which Tony Blair used so effectively in 1997. Cameron wants to show that he’s not part of the ‘establishment’. He listens to Morrissey, he thinks you should consider the whole man not just the political front, and any political faux pas merely plays in his favour.

The recent coverage of him breaking cycle laws is a PR gift, likening him to almost anyone who’s ever ridden a bike rather than a nitpickingly law-abiding po-faced politician. Similarly, his refusal to answer questions about whether he’s taken cannabis merely leads much of the population to assume that he has – and hence identify with him further.

The well-oiled media machine around Cameron helps him to cultivate this image perfectly – anything which might be to it’s detriment is quickly swept under the carpet, whilst extensive comment and hence more extensive copy is given to ’embarrassments’, like the cycling incident, which actually improve his image.

At present, David Cameron is playing a blinder, and the most incredible part of his strategy is that every jibe coming from attack-dog Labour only enhances his image – it comes across as the formed establishment trying to keep out the young incoming reformer.

All-in-all, it’s difficult to see where Cameron can go wrong at this point. The only effective strategy Labour has is to expose him as a carefully managed establishment figure – but in so-doing, they can only expose themselves as the same, and probably end up harming their own campaign as a result.

The results of the upcoming local elections will be fascinating. Whilst local elections rarely form an accurate reflection of the national game, it will be interesting to see if the Conservatives can make the gains necessary to solidify their position as the certain electoral leaders and gain yet more momentum going forward.

Essentially, though, even if the Conservatives fail to make huge gains in these elections, it’s unlikely Labour will, and so the worst possible outcome is neutral. In essence, as far as I can see and unless something radically unexpected happens, there’s no way the next government can be Labour: Cameron is quickly cycling towards election victory.

» Image Credit: Picture taken by Alison Ratcliffe, modified under licence.

In an effort to outdo his predecessors and aim a policy so firmly at middle England that it almost hurts, Alan Johnson is planning to introduce vascular health screening for all 40 to 74 year olds. Frankly, the only conceivable policy which would satisfy the Daily Mail more would be a knighthood for Paul Dacre.

Mr Johnson wants to write to every person in the country between the given ages and invite them to attend their GP surgery for screening. The screening method will be very simple, involving only measurements of BMI, gender, family history, blood pressure, and cholesterol. Essentially, it will let overweight Mr Goggins know that he’s at risk of having a heart attack, just like his father and his father before him. It doesn’t add an awful lot of anything over and above the existing QoF targets, but Mr Johnson maintains that these simple measures this will save 2,000 lives per year. And that’s not a bad soundbite.

He’s a very clever man, Mr Johnson: He must be, because he hasn’t yet decided who will do this screening nor where it will be done, yet he already knows its exact cost – £250m per year. I’m not entirely sure where it is he’s found this figure. Perhaps it came to him in a dream.

Perhaps, in his dream world, the inverse care law does not exist. He admits that only 75% of people will come to his screening appointments (indeed, that’s the percentage on which his mystery funding figure is apparently based), but perhaps in his world this won’t be made up of the worried well. In contrast to any other health intervention ever introduced in the UK, the people who will attend his screening appointments are the ones who really need to attend.

The clinically obese will beat a path to their GP’s door for the experience of being told they’re fat. Those living on the minimum wage will take a day off work and pay for the bus ride to their local pharmacy between 9am and 5pm to be told their cholesterol is high. And those at greatest risk of vascular events – men – will suddenly have an overwhelming desire to engage with health services. Or not.

Instead, this will turn out to be another ill-conceived plan pitched to the worried well of the middle classes, helpfully providing the promise of a new ‘life-saving service’ to the age and class demographic most likely to vote in the upcoming local elections. Not only will it add little of clinical value, but it will divert a vast amount of money from parts of the NHS which desperately need it – particularly those parts which have a less ‘sexy’, populist image.

This is one case where I’m very happy to be proved to be a cynical political blogger rather than a realist. I’d like nothing more than for this plan to turn out to be a vascular panacea. Unfortunately, I can’t see that happening – and the one thing worse than an ineffective NHS is one which squanders money pandering to the worried well, for such an NHS cannot survive for very long.

» Image Credit: Original photo by Catch 21 Productions, modified under licence.

In today’s complex world, it can become difficult to know who’s supporting who, which way the political wind is blowing, and who to believe when it comes to news reportage. Take The Daily Mirror, for example.

It is often asked why The Mirror performs so relatively poorly compared to it’s long-time rival, The Sun, which is the most popular and far-and-away the most politically powerful paper in the UK. There’s not a person in Westminster who is unaware of what ‘The Sun Says’ on any given issue, yet The Mirror is largely ignored.

Before every general election, the politically complex Sun is fought over by Labour and the Conservatives, desperate to secure the support of Rupert Murdoch and hence the paper, thus receiving a huge boost to the electoral campaign. The Mirror is always left behind.

So, in these difficult times, it can be hard to follow quite who The Mirror is supporting at any one time.

Take today’s paper, for example. The front page story? A relatively extensive report on minor traffic violations by David Cameron on a bike. Frankly, not a dissimilar level of reportage to that when Tony Blair became the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed by police, that time in relation to very serious charges.

And on the inside pages? Gordon Brown expresses his love for the ‘misunderstood’ Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, U2, and Leona Lewis: He’s really “down with the kids”. It’s Cool Britannia Mark II, and even less believable than the first time round.

I’m well aware that newspapers have always had political allegiances, but this particular juxtaposition struck me as so utterly ridiculous as to be worthy of comment.

» Image Credit: The Daily Mirror‘s front page, 21st March 2008.