It seems increasingly clear that, with all the current bad press Labour’s been getting, someone – probably Charles Clarke – needs to resign to reassure voters before Thursday’s local elections. Logic says that the most likely day for this to happen is today, because no-one wants it to drag on till Tuesday, when everything’s a bit close. But leaving it till Tuesday does have its advantages, as it makes Labour look responsive right before the election – it just doesn’t give campaigners the boost they need on the doorsteps over the Bank Holiday weekend.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an announcement today. But let’s face it, I’m usually very wrong…

Clarke, Hewitt, and Prescott – the newest terrible threesome.

Clarke’s under pressure after freeing over 1000 prisoners who should have been considered for deportation. With more and more such people being found every day, and the story just dripping on, there’s little chance of him surviving for much longer if this continues to drip.

Patricia Hewitt has been heckled at the RCN conference – the second time she’s been heckled in three days. For the first time, she actually seemed to come close to breaking today, complaining that whatever she said she’d be shouted at. That’s not good, and isn’t a ministerial response. Which must increase the odds of my prediction from January.

Prescott’s had an affair with a secretary, which has been very much buried. All-in-all, Labour’s been lucky – three potentially big stories all released on the same day, meaning each one will get less than its fair share of coverage in the news cycle.

But still, the headlines are looking bad for Labour right now.

And the future isn’t looking bright, either: The local elections in May will bring bad news for Labour, the by-election also in May will likely bring bad press, and then the Education Bill follows shortly afterwards, which is so controversial that it can only bring bad press – particularly with the ongoing police investigation into peerages being sold.

But bad news for Labour is bad news for us all. There’s no chance of Blair going until calm political waters present themselves for Brown’s succession to be as smooth and positive as possible – so it looks like we’ll be waiting for a while longer yet.

Following a discussion on the subject of student funding, I thought it time to get in touch with Mr Borrow again, knowing how well he represents my views. And so, I placed this in the big red shiny postbox today:

Dear Mr Borrow,

The average student has sixteen hours of formal teaching time each week. As a medical student, I have thirty-five hours of formal teaching time each week. Where is the logic in providing the same level of student support to all, despite clear disparity in the time available to supplement this support through paid employment?

I look forward to reading your response.

Yours sincerely,

It’ll be interesting to see whether he actually answers the question, as previous experience has shown that he, erm, doesn’t. I’ll let you know the response either way.

Just as an aside… Last time I wrote to the guy to ask him to support an EDM, he said he wasn’t going to sign any whilst acting as a PPS. In fact, I have the very letter on file:

I am currently the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Higher Education Minister, Kim Howells MP. When I was appointed I took the decision that as I was a member of the government, albeit at a very junior level, I would not sign EDM’s.

Strange, then, that during his PPS-ship, his signature appeared on 111 EDM’s. What’s all that about?

Update: 8th July 2006
To his credit, my MP did get in touch with Alan Johnson on my behalf. I was forwarded the reply from Bill Rammell, Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education:

Dear David

Thank you for your letter of 24 May, addressed to Alan Johnson, enclosing correspondence from Mr Simon Howard of (address removed) about the student support arrangements. I am replying as Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education.

I appreciate Mr Howard’s concerns about the difference in the number of contact hours medical students receive in tuition, compared to those on standard degree courses and appreciate why he feels the financial support should depend on the hours of study per week. However, time spent with lecturers will differ for individual students, depending on the type of course they undertake. Mr Howard may not realise that in addition to time spent in lectures and in tuition/contact time, students are also expected to undertake different types of activity. These include a personal study time, working with other students, research and project work. This is to enable students to develop and build upon the work carried out in lecture time and is part of the educational experience and development. As autonomous bodies, institutions are responsible for the service they provide for their students, including the level of contact time.

Nevertheless, I am aware that it is not always possible for some students to supplement their income from part-time employment. That is one of the reasons which we provide additional help through the Access to Learning Funds (sic) to those experiencing financial difficulties during their course. The Fund is administered directly by students’ individual institutions which are best placed to assess students’ circumstances. If Mr Howard has not already done so, he can obtain further information about the application process from the student services at his institution.

I do hope this clarifies the position for Mr Howard.

Yours sincerely

Bill Rammell MP

So he did quite well, and did seek out an answer to the question.

Thanks, Dave!

David Miliband has a blog. A blog that cost the taxpayer £6,000. And isn’t allowed to contain political comments.

Question one: How on earth did it cost £6,000 to set up? That’s hundreds times more than this blog has cost in it’s entire lifespan, and there are a great many tools out there (WordPress.com and Blogger, for example) that would have allowed him to do the same for nothing.

Question two: What’s the point? A politician sets up a blog that can’t have political comments on it?

Question three: Can I have my money back, please?

To be fair, he does attempt to answer one of the above three questions in his blurb:

This blog is my attempt to help bridge the gap – the growing and potentially dangerous gap – between politicians and the public. It will show some of what I’m doing, what I’m thinking about, and what I’ve read, heard or seen for myself which has sparked interest or influenced my ideas.

I’m not entirely sure who Mr Miliband thinks will read his blog, and I’m slightly scared that the fact I’ve visited it will be one more hit towards the definition of success. And quite how he’s going to tell us what he’s thinking as a politician without making political comments is unclear. But I’m sure this is a good use of taxpayer’s money…!

Even Boris can do it better…

SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency) has launched today. No doubt they’ll lock up all the naughty criminals, probably without trial. In fact, they might just start detaining people at birth, or killing everyone with a padded jacket. After all, from a flashy (expensive) looking press-room, Mr Blair annoucned they’re going to make life ‘hell’ for ‘Mr Bigs’. The easiest, most-efficient way to do this is to shoot or detain everyone who looks a little bit dodgy. So that’s probably what’ll happen.

And they have a fantastically New Labour target: “To reduce harm”. Prove they’ve suceeded or failed at that!

But what about all the criminals who aren’t serious? What about those who are just killing people for a bit of a laugh? They’re going to thrive! Poisonous custard-pie throwings a-go-go! I think the government have missed a trick… and made an appropriate acronym: After all, crime is all a bit of a political sport to Mr Blair.

Mr Blair has apparently admitted that announcing that he wouldn’t serve a fourth term in office was a mistake. From the Beeb:

He said: “What happened when you get into your third term and you are coming up to your tenth year is that it really doesn’t matter what you say, you are going to get people saying it should be time for a change.

“This speculation, I think, probably would happen whatever decision you take.

“Now, it was an unusual thing for me to say but people kept asking me the question so I decided to answer it. Maybe that was a mistake.”

So is he finally admitting that he’s done something strategically wrong? Well, no. The PMOS has come out, all guns blazing, with a ‘What he meant to say’ statement:

What he had intended to say was, she said: “It was a mistake… to believe that the announcement would kill off the speculation as to when I would resign.”

Except, clearly not, as he had a fully formed sentence there already. But hey. The slightly ridiculous thing is that what Mr Blair says no longer seems to tally with, well, what Mr Blair actually says. Just a couple of weeks back, Nick Robinson discovered this problem. He looked through the official transcript of the Prime Minister’s monthly press conference to find when he had said this:

Look as you say I am hopeful we will get the vast majority of Labour MPs behind us, in fact I am absolutely sure we will get the vast majority. The question is whether we manage to get enough to get it through with Labour votes alone. But in a sense the issue is doing the right thing for the country, it’s what the country expects and of course I want to do it with Labour MPs in full support. Look I think this is a very, very critical issue for the Labour Party for its instincts, for what it’s about, for what it is trying to do.

He had said it, it was there on tape. But the official transcript said:

I think I have said what I have said on Guantanamo. And on the first part, you know if you look at the school system at the moment…

Now, there’s always a good place for corrections and clarifications. They’re an important part of everyday life. But when you are making them up (as seemingly with the first) or just not acknowledging that a change has been made (as with the second), you’re getting into very, very dodgy territory.

Last Tuesday, a little more than three years after the first strikes against Iraq, Mr Blair gave a foreign policy speech. I’m not one for deconstructing speeches at great length, but he has said a few things I disagree with.

the defining characteristic of today’s world is its interdependence

That, to be frank, is bollocks. Mr Blair isn’t interested in interdependence. In fact, he want to lose the interdependence that’s been foisted upon him, as he doesn’t want to have to rely on other countries for supplies of, well, anything – least of all, oil. And in many ways, that’s sound foreign policy. The world is an unpredictable place, you can never be sure that your friends today will be your friends tomorrow. So to start waffling on about ‘common global policy based on common values’ is utter rot. The peoples of the world are never going to have common values. People are always going to think different things; the challenge is to live alongside one another, not to try and make everybody adhere to the same ‘common values’.

He says we shouldn’t ‘extremism, conflict or injustice go unchecked’. Whose extremist, whose conflict, and whose injustice? We don’t have ‘common values’. One man’s extremist is another’s moderate. And if we’re not letting conflict go unchecked, who’s checking up on the Iraq war? And what’s injustice? There’s plenty of that in this country. Our value system says that treating the poor worse than the rich is less terrible than treating women worse than men. Perhaps those in the Middle East disagree. That doesn’t mean we should carpet bomb them, it means we should discuss (celebrate?) our differences.

The consequence of this thesis is a policy … that is active not reactive.

We’re now admitting to bombing countries based on what they might do in the future. Whatever happened to that one ‘common value’ of innocent until proven guilty?

This world view – which I would characterise as a doctrine of benign inactivity – sits in the commentator’s seat, almost as a matter of principle.

Would we not rather benign inactivity than malignant activity, the logical conclusion of which is a world permanently at war?

The easiest line for any politician seeking office in the West today is to attack American policy. A couple of weeks ago as I was addressing young Slovak students, one got up, denouncing US/UK policy in Iraq, fully bought in to the demonisation of the US, utterly oblivious to the fact that without the US and the liberation of his country, he would have been unable to ask such a question, let alone get an answer to it.

And, perhaps, if we in this country had this ‘pro-active’ stance whereby we attack anyone we don’t feel quite fits into the ideals and values we hold true to ourselves, then Mr Blair may not have been able to mock such a student. Attacking a country provokes a response from that country and its allies. Hitler learned that around about 1935, when he decided that Poland didn’t quite fit into his world vision. When will Blair realise it? When will it ‘click’ for him that ‘pro-active’ warfare is nothing short of a race to world instability? And why does he feel he can engage in such activity, and yet roundly denounce similar action in the Israel – Palestine conflict?

Ministers have been advised never to use the term “Islamist extremist”. It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those – perfectly decent-minded people – who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a “Protestant” bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it.

Yes, but you would call him ‘Protestant’, not ‘Christian’. Just as the KKK were the KKK, and not ‘Christian’. Why, then, associate a whole religion with the terrorists rather than being more specific? The answer is straightforward: The majority of the electorate identify with Christian values, and so to attack Christianity is to attack the electorate. Only a minority identify with Muslim values, and it’s politically convenient to associate a religion with the cause, rather than to deal with the underlying issues. You would never class the actions of that Northern Ireland Protestant as religious, but rather as political. To class the actions of Muslims as political gives them a degree of validity, which means they have to be argued against and tackled. That’s hard. Much easier to say ‘Muslim bad’, and demonise the set of people, then the majority, believing as they are told to believe, will support any action against ‘the baddies’.

I recall the video footage of Mohammed Sadiq Khan, the man who was the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers. … There was something tragic, terrible but also ridiculous about such a diatribe. He may have been born here. But his ideology wasn’t. And that is why it has to be taken on, everywhere.

But by ‘taking it on’, Mr Blair means criminalising it, killing it. Not reasoning with it. Not arguing the points on their merits. Is it wrong to say that the West persecutes Muslims? No, there’s evidence of it in the newspapers most days. Is the right response to attack Britain? No. But does that mean we should simply destroy the West-hating ideology, or that we should rather engage with it, tackle the issues, and move forward?

This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence, at their core.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive;

No! No! No! You don’t ‘defeat ideas’ by telling people that they’re wrong. You explain to them. You let them make their argument, and you engage with it, recognise the kernel truths, and point out the flaws. Terrorists know Mr Blair finds their beliefs abhorrent – that’s the raison d’etre behind their terrorism. How’s that approach going so far?

It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other.

This just returns to the original point: Why should all the world be the same? Why can’t we have some nations we would view as ‘progressive’, and some we wouldn’t? Who are we to cast judgement over the beliefs and values of those so far removed from ourselves?

Anyway, enough from Blair. A couple of Grauniad folks have had their say on the speech, and they know rather more about these things than I. Dan Plesch, like me, thinks he’s wrong. Harry Hatchet thinks he’s right. Perhaps I’m wrong, and Harry’s right. I’m really in no position to judge.

But something that’s clear to me is that this is all political bickering. It’s undoubtedly essential bickering, deciding the future foreign policy of the country, but, as with most policies in politics, it’ll be changed by this time next year. One thing that won’t change is the reality of the situation for people who’ve lived it. People like Karzan Sherabayani. For him, Iraq isn’t a three-year problem, it’s a thirty-year one.

One of the most powerful pieces of television I’ve seen in a long time is his seven-minute report on his return to Iraq, after exceptionally cruel treatment under Saddam’s regime. It was first shown on More 4 News on Monday, then on Channel Four News on Tuesday. You have the ability to watch it any time, here. Please, please do watch it. Iraq shouldn’t be about politics, it should be about people. And Mr Sherabayani really brings this home.

It appears that Mr Blair will, this evening, get his education reform bill through the Commons. Lucky him. He’s also not going to see anything like the huge rebellion some think he will – as far as I can see, he’s not going to have any huge haemorrhage of support. That seems hugely unlikely. He’ll certainly still get a majority of his party – more like two-thirds, if not more.

Of course, if David Cameron wanted to play nasty, he could have some sudden epiphany, and do a complete U-turn, and not support the bill. Then there’s a reasonably high chance that it would not be passed (though that would still take a Labour rebellion of 35), and Blair would pretty much be forced to resign. It’d do some damage to the Conservative party temporarily, but a limited amount, especially as it would barely make it into the news cycle if Blair resigned. But I very much doubt he’d ever do that, or even that he could – a lot of Conservative MPs are very much in favour of the Bill, and probably wouldn’t stick with a change in party line.

So this crucial vote isn’t really so crucial. Only if forty or so Labour MPs rebelled would it cast doubt on Blair’s leadership, and that’s not going to happen. At least, I highly doubt it. We’ll find out in a few hours, I guess.

Update
Heck, I didn’t think he’d get 40 MPs rebelling, and it turns out he had 51. Shows how much I know. But he did get his timetable proposal through, so that somewhat lessens the blow. Probably not in the Mail, though, I’d imagine.

The Times’s Ann Treneman has successfully diagnosed the problem with our Health Secretary, Pat “crazy lady” Hewitt:

PATRICIA HEWITT is suffering from a medical condition in which she says the opposite of what is true. Those close to the Health Secretary accept this and have learnt to cope. So when Pat says “the sun is shining” they know that, in fact, it is bucketing down and to take an umbrella.

Yesterday she tackled Sir Nigel Crisp’s abrupt departure from the NHS by heaping praise on him. Hearing this, we all assumed he had been pushed.

She spoke of him in the kind of hushed tones that many people would reserve for an extraordinary pet: a parakeet that could knit jumpers, for instance, or dog that could speak Japanese. “Under his leadership,” she said, her voice lapping upon us like the gentlest of waves, “we have seen extraordinary improvements — record improvements — in the performance of the NHS.”

This made us realise things were worse than we had thought. MPs exchanged looks of incredulity. The Tories were rustling like rats in a pantry. “Retired! Retired!” they muttered, eyes wide with wonder. Ms Hewitt pretended this wasn’t happening.

She has now perfected the art of acting like all three wise monkeys at once: she sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. If she isn’t careful, she might get a reputation for being vacuous.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, was spluttering. Mr Lansley looks a bit like the mild-mannered Barney Rubble from The Flintstones. Yesterday, though, he managed something approaching anger as he tried to extract the truth out of Ms Hewitt about the ever rising NHS yearly deficit.

This proved as difficult as getting a tooth taken out by an NHS dentist. Ms Hewitt was wearing a giant fake flower on her lapel. All new Labour women have these (I assume a mail-order catalogue is involved) and the Health Secretary owns several. Yesterday she had on a pink peony that was as large as a bread plate. As she came under attack from all sides of the House about the deficits, the peony began to tremble with outrage.
We knew the finances were out of control because she kept insisting she was getting a grip on them. Mr Lansley charted the deficit in remorseless detail. First she said it would be £200 million.

But, after six months, she admitted it was closer to £620 million. So what was the real figure? Was it not now approaching £800 million?

She sat, lips pursed, peony poised for battle. Mr Rubble wasn’t letting her off the hook. Was she going to take responsibility for this? Or, he asked slyly, did Sir Nigel have to take the blame? “Perhaps he doesn’t yet appreciate to what extent he is going to pay a last service to the National Health Service, or at least to the Secretary of State, in acting as fall guy for the lack of financial control in the NHS.”

Her voice was deadly calm now. She praised Sir Nigel for being “outstanding”. (It sounds so damning when she says it.) Then, in what doctors are now saying is as close to a miracle cure as has been seen for her condition, Ms Hewitt admitted things were not utterly fantastic. The House erupted in hoots of laughter. Things are, obviously, very serious indeed.

I’ve always known there was something wrong…

Council Tax is rising by a predictable amount – probably as low as it could possibly ever rise by, given that it primarily funds people’s salaries.  But if one more person goes on TV claiming it’s a stealth tax, I think I’ll scream.  It’s by far the most publicised and debated tax we pay.  It’s forever in the media.  It’s about as stealthy as taking your pet elephant round Tesco, having previously taken it to get its hair dyed orange.  It’s not in anyway stealthy.  So to call it a stealth tax is positively ludicrous.