And another thing…

THIS could well be number 106 in John Rentoul’s series of “Questions to which the answer is No”.

PoliticsHome is reporting an interview given this morning by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth in which he says the country would regret electing a Tory goverment “after the 6th of May.”

Cue all sorts of heart flutters and faux excitement in the media. “Bob’s let slip the election date!”

No he hasn’t. He’s assuming, like everyone else, that polling will coincide with the local elections on 6 May. But as I’ve said before, very few – if any – Cabinet ministers will have been taken into the Prime Minister’s confidence on the date.

Given the public appetite for conspiracy theories, I’m surprised no-one has actually suggested that Bob’s and Chris Bryant’s comments earlier this month are part of a complex subterfuge aimed at persuading the Tories to prepare for an election on the wrong date…

I’LL TRY to keep this short…

Alcohol abuse is a huge problem in this country, much greater than problems caused by illegal drug abuse or by smoking.

I don’t know how to tackle it, I really don’t, because our culture venerates the act of getting drunk. Too many people go to the pub at weekends not to have a drink but to get drunk. As a nation, a significant minority of us seem to be incapable of enjoying a drink without actually becoming paralytic.

“Ah!” say our very civilised, sophisticated (dare I say “middle class”?) moral guardians. “It’s the working classes that are the problem. We, of course, have enough disposable income to enjoy a nice Chablis when the mood takes us, and that’s as it should be. But it’s simply not good enough for the Burberry-wearing classes to be able to afford their own favourite tipple, in boxes of 48, out of the local Asda.”

If we genuinely believe that the only way we can stop people over-indulging is to make alcohol too expensive for “them” (and we know who “them” are, don’t we?), then we might as well throw in the towel right now.

Something in Jessica's body language suggested it might be time to review our relationship

First off, it’s patronising. Secondly, it wouldn’t achieve any long-term cultural or attitudinal change, which is what’s really required if Britain is going to get over its love affair with drunkenness.

And thirdly – and by far most importantly – minimum pricing of alcohol won’t work. Do you imagine that the type of person who gets blitzed on a 12-pack of Carlsberg from the local supermarket is going to see the new, increased price label and say to himself: “No, I can no longer afford to indulge my drinking habit. I will therefore save my money and spend it instead on books for my children.”?

If someone wants to get drunk, then you know what? They’re going to get drunk. If they have to go into debt or deprive their families of the bare essentials in order to do it, then that’s what will happen. And given that for those in work, levels of disposable income are higher than ever, you’d have to push prices up a hell of a lot before it would have even a marginal impact on consumption.

People drink alcohol for many reasons, and the price of it may well be a factor. But I doubt if it’s anywhere near the most important one. I hope the government doesn’t end up on the wrong side of this argument, as Paul Waugh hints today.

Of course, if people were allowed to have a fag in the pub then perhaps they’d be less inclined to buy cheap booze from the supermarket and drink it at home. But let’s not go down that road again…

LORD Turnbull is peeved, apparently, at Alastair Campbell’s suggestion that Clare Short was excluded from discussions about the Iraq war because she couldn’t be trusted not to leak the information.

Such remarks were “very poor”, says the former head of the civil service. The former International Development Secretary’s views should have been respected.

But which views are they? The ones which led her to tell BBC Radio 4 that she would not support going to war without a specific UN mandate? Or her views – put in a letter from her to every Labour MP a few days later – that we should support the government motion to do just that?

And then, after Robin Cook and John Denham had stolen her thunder by taking a principled stand against the war and resigning from the government, she used post-war planning (or lack of it) as an excuse finally to give up her own ministerial Mondeo two months later.

Yeah, that’s clearly someone whose judgment could be relied upon when critical discussions were being held…

IT’S STRANGE, isn’t it, that a media which regularly bemoans the end of collective government and the by-passing of parliament by the executive is the same media which believes all junior ministers are privy to the Prime Minister’s innermost thoughts?

Chris Bryant, the Europe Minister, is today accused of “letting slip” the date of the general election. I spoke to Chris last night when news of this “faux pas” first emerged and he was pretty amused by it all. I know him well, so I know that there is no way he actually said the election would be on any specific date. If anything, all he did was make a passing remark about the date which most people assume the poll will be held, and acknowleged that it was no more than that – an assumption.

But more importantly, do The Telegraph and other news outlets acutually believe that the date of the general election – the naming of which lies exclusively in the hands of the Prime Minister – is information which is shared with every member of the government? I doubt if even those few Cabinet ministers who are closely involved in election planning are more than 70 per cent sure about the date even today. And the majority of the Cabinet will know no more than the public.

THERE’S a lie that the Tories love to repeat over and over again. The aim, presumably, is to repeat it often enough so that the general populace start to believe it.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, was at it again today, telling BBC News Channel that the government, in the last 12 years, “has spent money like there’s no tomorrow to very little effect.”

We didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining, according to Dave’s Big Book of Rubbish Soundbites.

No, we didn’t fix the roof – we bought a brand new one, much better than the old one.

Let’s be clear about what the Tories mean when they sneer about the money Labour has spent: the new schools and hospitals, the cuts in NHS waiting lists, the improvements in exam performance, the record high number of young people going on to further and higher education.

These are all wonderful and significant achievements. And they mean a great deal to the families who have benefited from all that investment – the children who would otherwise have attended schools in dilapidated, drafty Victorian school buildings, the concerned relatives of patients who, under the Tories, would have continued to be treated in an under-resourced NHS, the communities who, without Labour, would have had to rely on a police force deliberately prevented from recruiting to full strength.

And all of this cost money. Lots of it.

The Tories would prefer not to have spent it. The new schools, the new hospitals, the new nurses, the new doctors, the new police officers, the new teachers, the new classroom assistants, the new SureStart centres… Every single one of these achievements is regarded by the Conservative Party as of “no avail”.

Just think about that.

To be fair, the Tories have been consistent about this sort of thing. They have made no secret about their preference for tax cuts over public services. They have nothing but contempt for any government that “squanders” public money on wasteful enterprises such as the winter heating allowance, pension credits and tax credits to encourage people off benefits and into work.

As for the NHS, consider this: every single Tory MP elected at the 2005 general election won his or her seat on a manifesto commitment to transfer billions of pounds of NHS funding directly into the private health service. Yet those same Tory MPs who campaigned for such a horrific idea now claim they have changed their minds about the wisdom of the so-called “Patient’s Passport”. All of them. They all changed their minds.

Do you believe them?

This is the same party which lionizes one Daniel Hannan MEP, a man who holds the NHS itself in contempt, who described it as “a 60-year mistake”. Yeah, the usual suspects in the Shadow Cabinet were ordered to walk outside to tell the press that Hannan did not represent the views of his party. But we all know that Hannan’s words far more accurately reflected the views of the majority of Tory MPs and of the overwhelming majority of Tory Party members.

That’s the choice Britain will face in 2010: between a Labour Party which has done everything in its power both to save and grow our public services and to protect ordinary families from the ravages of an unprecedented world recession; and a Tory Party, unchanged in its political culture from its 1980s incarnation, which despises investment in public services – and despises some of those public services themselves – and has opposed every single measure proposed by the government to mitigate the effects of the recession.

Labour will have an uphill struggle to make the case for its re-election in 2010. Four consecutive victories don’t come along very often. But the alternative to a re-elected Labour government is bleak indeed.

Britain cannot afford to have sitting round the Cabinet table men and women who regard new and improved schools and hospitals as nothing more than expensive and disposable luxuries.

CHRISTMAS is stressful enough without government bodies poking their noses in and telling us how to celebrate it.

Last year we had Baroness Morgan issuing advice on the bleeding’ obvious avoiding festive accidents in the home. Now this year we have the Carbon Trust warning us that artificial trees are more harmful to the environment than real ones.

Well, I disagree. We’ve had our seven-feet fibre optic tree since Christmas 2004 and it’s got plenty of life in it still. And what about all the electricity you use to vacuum up all the fallen needles from real pine trees?

Most importantly, what about all the petrol you use up driving around in the dead of night looking for Forestry Commission land that doesn’t have a particularly robust fence or patrolling guard dogs?

Incidentally, did anyone else notice that the Carbon Trust spokesperson’s name is Vanessa Pine? I wonder how often she’s needled about that, eh? Ooh, stop me now…

GOOD to see that the Christmas spirit has permeated even the Government Whips’ Office. This is what next week’s whip looked like when it arrived in the post today…

I AM INCONSOLABLE. I can barely concentrate on anything, so frantic with worry am I that 63,000 convicted prisoners might be prevented from voting in the general election.

It’s an outrageous infringement of their human rights, according to the European Court of Human Rights. Mind you, so’s keeping people in a big, secure building for years. As is preventing you from living in your own home, or from going to work, or… well, you catch my drift.

Do I give a stuff that the Council of Europe is a bit annoyed at the UK for (ahem!) dragging our feet on implementing the court’s ruling? No, not really.

Am I incensed that 63,000 criminals who deliberately sacrificed their personal freedoms when they chose to break the law might be disenfranchised? No. At least, not as incensed as I was when the European Court made its original ruling that they should be enfranchised in the first place.

What a sad, dreary, frightening place must be the mind of the professional hand-wringer who frets about criminals not being allowed to vote.

Here’s a tip for those whose residence at Her Majesty’s pleasure might prevent them from expressing a preference for their chosen (LibDem, probably) candidate at the election: avoid prison in the first place by not breaking the law.

"Why would I want to vote for any of them anyway? They're all crooks..."

LIBDEM MP Jo Swinson has revealed through her Facebook page Twitter that she has been dropped by the Beeb from tonight’s Question Time panel.

I know how she feels, though in my case it was a senior minister who ordained that I should not appear, despite the Beeb actually wanting me on the panel. This was in the aftermath of the hoo-ha over my blogpost asking why everyone was so bloody miserable. I was still a minister at the time, and wanted to remain one. So, cravenly, I submitted and withdrew.

“Thanks, Tom, we’ll make it up to you,” I was told. Weeks later I was sacked.

Politics, eh?

ACCORDING to Professor David Nutt, mere democratically-elected politicians cannot be trusted to implement important policy decisions. Instead, dead brainy types – like him, for example – should be allowed to run the country without all this democratic accountability and such stuff and nonsense.

Nutt said:

Until Gordon Brown took office there has never been a recommendation about drug classification from the council that has been rejected by government. Gordon Brown comes into office and soon after that he starts saying absurd things like cannabis is lethal… it has to be a Class B drug. He has made his mind up.

We went back, we looked at the evidence, we said, “No, no, there is no extra evidence of harm, it’s still a Class C drug.”

He said, ‘Tough, it’s going to be Class B.”

The damn cheek of these pols who have opinions of their own! Don’t they realise that the job of government and parliament is simply to rubber stamp the decisions of their advisers?

Advisers advise – ministers decide. It’s a fundamental principle of democracy. We cannot and should not farm out every policy decision to unelected advisers. Ministers should treat the advice they receive seriously, of course. But then they should apply their own political judgment. Some will be horrified at the suggestion that politics should even come into it, but that’s what democracy is about – elected politicians being paid to exercise their political judgment on behalf of their constituents and the country.

When the government (rightly) rejected advice given to it by the Electoral Commission a few years back, the LibDems in the Commons were outraged. Well, of course they were – that’s what they’re there for. What’s the point of setting up a body like the Electoral Commission when you don’t accept its recommendations, they asked, their collective bottom lip quivering. For a party which never stops whining about how undemocratic the UK allegedly is, the LibDems are surprisingly eager to delegate sovereignty to other people.

The actual arguments about cannabis reclassification are another issue. The point is that if politicians are seen to make the wrong decision, after listening to all the advice, then they will pay the price for that at the ballot box. Appointed advisers can’t, by definition, be held accountable in that way. All they can do is throw their toys out the pram, ignore the collective responsibility that’s necessary for government to work and encourage their fomer colleagues to throw a strop as well.

One last point: Alan Johnson could so easily have kept this controversy alive by equivocating about whether or not to sack Nutt. “I have complete faith in Professor Nutt,” you can imagine him insisting to reporters as the saga wore on, inflicting more and more damage on the government during the three or four weeks leading up to Nutt’s inevitable dismissal. Instead, the Home Secretary acted refreshingly quickly and decisively, and he should be congratulated for displaying the smack (no pun intended) of firm leadership.