And another thing…

CAN LABOUR win under the current electoral system? Well, given that we have won three times in the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess at “yes”.

If some of Labour’s parliamentary candidates reckon we can’t win unless we promise a referendum on the alternative vote on the same day as the general election, maybe they should be examining their own so-called “democratic credentials”.

The ambition of the 34 candidates is truly soaring: “hundreds” of LibDems throughout the country would switch to Labour if we were to hold a referendum on the same day. Phew! That many, eh? Nearly enough to affect the result in … well, a seat, probably.

They propose a “government Bill” to facilitate such a referendum. The only problem there is that such a Bill is very unlikely to succeed. Apart from those Labour MPs who would oppose it (including Yours Truly), the Libdems would be likely to campaign against it on the basis that it’s not precisely the exact system that would most benefit them be most democratic.

And can we please stop all this nonsense about the 1997 manifesto commitment? That was a promise of a referendum, not on AV but on AV+, a version of AV which would be even more calamitous than straightforward AV, with “assisted places scheme” MPs (like those in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) being “elected”. We have never made a manifesto commitment to a referendum on AV.

You have to wonder why Labour candidates are so keen to get into Parliament if all they want to do is bargain away power to the LibDems. “Ah,” they will argue, “but the Tories were in government for most of the 20th century and we must make the 21st century the century of progressive politics.”

Yeah, okay, I’ll sign up to that. But you know the best way of electing a Labour government? Not through messy, sordid little deals with the minor parties, but by winning more votes than the Tories. That’s how they stayed in power for most of the last century – by beating us in elections; by offering the electorate policies that were more popular than ours.

By carping on about voting systems, we simply reinforce the notion – and I hope and believe it’s a wrong notion – that we have nothing to offer the voters but electoral calculations.

SOME politicians are very protective of their private lives. Others prefer to splash every detail in the hope of garnering some positive PR.

Personally, I’ve tried to find a middle way: although Carolyn is frequently pictured with me, we never allow pictures of our boys to be published anywhere and I don’t even refer to them by their real names on this blog. At the same time, this is a personal blog so inevitably some details of life at Casa Harris emerge from time to time.

But this is as blatant and as cynical an example of shameless politiking as I’ve ever seen. As Guido (hat-tip, by the way) rightly asks, I wonder if the blushing bride knew if the photographic memories of her happy day were going to be used for political propaganda?

No wonder the public hate politicians.

THERE’S been a lot of excitement (and wishful thinking) in some parts of the Scottish media at the prospect that Labour’s attack on the SNP over the cancellation of the Glasgow Airport Rail Link (GARL) might rebound on us.

The source of all this hyperventilating was an entirely unsourced and officially denied report that Glasgow was about to be removed from the East Coast Mainline timetable.

And yesterday The Scotsman reported:

THE head of the government’s newly nationalised rail franchise last night defended controversial plans that could include cutting train services between London and Glasgow.

Come again? “Defended controversial plans”? Surely the reporter meant “fictitous”, not “controversial”? Or, at the very least, “hypothetical”? What lousy journalism.

Let me reiterate: there are no plans to remove Glasgow from the timetable. Ministers will, at some point in the future, be asked to approve the structure of future services for the East Coast Mainline franchise. But that specification hasn’t yet been finalised or submitted to ministers. Consultation on the specification is still happening even as I write.

And why is The Scotsman getting so excited at the words of Elaine Holt? She is a very good train company manager; she did a first class job when she was in charge of the London commuter network, First Capital Connect. But in her role as chief executive of the (temporarily) publicly-owned East Coast, she is not in a position to decide where her trains will stop. Neither does she have any say on whether the next (private) franchise for the East Coast will remove Glasgow or any other station from the timetable.

She was expressing her opinion as an experienced railway manager as to the pros and cons of East Coast services continuing to serve Glasgow, and she’s entitled to her opinion.

But when it comes to structure of future service patterns, it’s ministers who make the decisions, not Elaine Holt or any other manager. And when the Secretary of State makes his decision, I’m sure she will be informed along with everyone else. No doubt The Scotsman won’t give as much coverage to a decision to maintain the Glasgow service as they have given to imaginary plans to remove it.

I’LL GET straight to the point: any attempt at regulating blogs would be doomed to failure from the start. And it’s a bonkers idea anyway.

But the prospect of it happening has been the blogosphere’s darkest nightmare for a very long time, and until now I’ve always considered it as something of a straw man. Unfortunately, it’s none other than Baroness Buscombe, chairperson of the Press Complaints Commission, who has raised this as a serious prospect.

According to Ian Burrell of The Independent:

She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC’s role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media’s highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?

Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” Baroness Buscombe told me. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”

Look, if anyone in the UK regards a political blog as somewhere to pick up objective news and analysis, then they don’t deserve the protection of an “independent regulator”; they deserve to be force-fed every nutcase conspiracy theory and viscious smear going. If you want news, buy a newspaper, or visit a news organisation’s website. I’m a fan and a friend of Dale’s but even he wouldn’t pretend that he’s a source of objective political news and analysis.

The suggestion could only have been made by someone with absolutely no notion of what blogs are, and how and why they operate. My only consolation is that the suggestion hasn’t come from the government.

The Baroness says that the if the PPC wanted to consider bringing blogs under its remit, such a move “would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC’s umbrella).”

Oh, dear me. Well, good luck with that, Baroness. I’ll be interested to see what you conclude. But, in common with most other bloggers worth their name, And another thing… will never come under the regulation of the PCC or anyone else.

This is what I had to say in April about the government’s previous attempt to regulate blogs.

UPDATE on Wednesday at 9.20 am: Okay, folks, just relax. Guido has done what I should have done before publishing the above and actually asked the PPC about their intentions blog-wise. Nothing to see here, apparently. No plans to regulate blogs. Well, okay, then….

CONGRATULATIONS to BevaniteEllie, aka the Stilletoed Socialist, for her successful campaign to get the classic Phil Collins video used for the next Labour party election broadcast. Don’t see the relevance, personally, but I can’t fault the musical taste. Class.

FOLLOWING my disgraceful and unacceptably offensive levity in previous posts dealing with Liz Truss’s troubles with the Tories of South West Norfolk, I thought I should expand on my own thoughts as regards adulterous politicians.

I don’t condone it, personally; I just don’t think it should necessarily bar someone from office. I recently came across a letter I wrote to The Herald in October 1998 in defence of Presdient Clinton.

7 October 1998

THE current vendetta against President Clinton is being pursued by the Republican establishment for one reason only – to reverse the election results of 1992 and 1996.

It is becoming clear that Kenneth Starr’s objective in carrying out his initial investigation into the Whitewater land deals was not to discover the truth, but to come up with evidence – any evidence – with which to impeach the President. Having failed to deliver what was expected of him on Whitewater, he resorted to investigating Mr Clinton’s sex life. But did those who voted for Mr Clinton do so on the basis that he was a faithful husband, or on the basis that he was a politician who could deliver more than his opponents? If the latter is the case, the Republicans could yet pay the price for their cynicism at the ballot-box.

Perhaps this whole experience is nothing more than post-cold war trauma on the part of a US body politic that hasn’t yet discovered a role after the collapse of the communist bloc. Congress would never have considered making a laughing-stock of the nation through this kind of damaging, and ultimately irrelevant, self-indulgence while the international audience for such a Capitol Hill farce included an enemy as vigilant and as powerful as the Soviet Union.

A rather good letter, I thought at the time, though Carolyn was not best pleased that I had gone into print in defence of an adulterer less than a month after our own wedding…

UPDATE at 10.20 pm: Calls of “Burn the witch!” and “Get a rope!” at tonight’s meeting of SW Norfolk Conservatives have been ignored and Liz Truss has secured her nomination as candidate. Good for her. Now let’s hope she loses.

Hat-tip to Iain Dale.

PITY poor Nick Clegg.

He is, first of all, leader of the LibDems. Also, he’s been finding it hard to attract any publicity. He is, after all, the only one of the three main party leaders with absolutely no chance whatever of being Prime Minister. Ever.

So that rather limits your options when it comes to seizing the agenda. In the summer he pretended that he wanted parliament to cancel its recess in order to get MPs’ expenses sorted out. He had a moderate hit with that one, so he’s tried the same thing again, by “demanding” (bless) that the Queen’s Speech is cancelled and that we spent the next six months wringing our hands in anguish (but he doesn’t want us to mention MEPs’ expenses scams, for some odd reason).

Yeah, we know that very little of the next legislative programme will make it onto the statute books before the general election, Mick – we read newspapers when we were at school as well; we know how the constitution works. Just get back in your box and concentrate on what LibDems do best: complaining about dog crap on the pavement then doing sod all about it.

And if you don’t feel like making conversation with a parliamentary under-secretary of state during the walk from the Commons to the Lords on Wednesday while Brown and Cameron discuss grown-up stuff at the front of the procession, why not just stay at home and write whateer you intend to say next time you appear on “Thought for the Day”?

ALTHOUGH I try to hide it, I’m a bit of a Doctor Who fan, and tonight was a big date in this year’s calendar for me – the latest in David Tenant’s hour-long specials.

Waters of Mars tried to be – and was largely successful in being – a straightforward Alien-like thriller. It was tense and stylish, though not anywhere near as scary as predicted by the outgoing showrunner, Russell “the T” Davies. On another level, it returned to the occasionally-visited theme of the Doctor being the last of the Timelords and what that actually means (other than his achieving WWF status as an endangered species).

Tenant has explored this terrain before, most notably in his first appearance in the role, when he killed the leader of the Sycorax in 2005’s The Christmas Invasion, warning him: “No second chances.” This was a new facet of the character; more ruthless, less patient. Unfortunately, for most of the rest of Tenant’s reign in the Tardis, he was more like the traditional character: superior, compassionate, willing to offer that second chance to any enemy who needed it.

In Waters of Mars the Doctor finally seemed to succumb to the inevitable arrogance that most people would associate with the title “Timelord”; he actually started inventing his own rules and saying “tough” whenever someone disagreed with him. That would have been a fascinating direction to take his character. but at the very end he seemed to revert to his more familiar and safe “white hat” mode, which was a pity.

A very good episode, though, and miles better than the disappointing Planet of the Dead.

Of course, the trailer for the Christmas special, The End of Time, must have whetted every viewer’s appetite for Tenant’s curtain call in the title role. And John Sim’s back as the Master! I’ll blog, one of these days, about the drunken conversation I had with him a couple of years ago.

RORY Bremner seems to think that affecting a Scottish accent is all it takes to impersonate the PM. John Culshaw, on the other hand, has nailed it.

I’m sure even Gordon would find this funny…

Hat-top: Obnoxio the Clown