And another thing…

A REGULAR commenter, an SNP supporter, recently criticised his (Labour) MP for having served as a councillor in another part of the country before being elected as MP in the constituency where he was born and raised.

The implication was all too evident: if you’ve ever lived or worked outside a constituency, your legitimacy as a potential representative is suspect. It reminds me of a joke on a panel show recently, where a resident of Cornwall was forever known to the community as “the Traveller” because he had once visited London. (On a supplementary and entertaining note, this same commentator once claimed in a thread that he was a “thorn in the side” of his MP. When I asked my colleague if this was true, he had no idea who I was talking about.)

You come across this nonsense a lot: only someone who has lived in a constituency all his life is deemed suitable as its MP. All other qualifications – political beliefs, ability to string a sentence together, personal honesty, track record of commitment to the party – are of less importance than the shining, glorious Holy Grail of having a politically correct postcode.

Certainly, if the choice is between two candidates who are broadly equal in terms of ability and experience, then the local person (if there is one) would have an understandable advantage. But it’s hardly the most important qualification. And when a local candidate is roundly beaten in a fair and open democratic vote, then local members obviously agree.

"This is a LOCAL constituency, for LOCAL candidates..."

HAD A VAGUELY interesting Twitter exchange today about turnouts at general elections. Gosh! It isn’t long before someone in these threads mentions their desire for a “none of the above” option on the ballot paper, is it? I wonder if there’s a term for that particular phenomenon…?

I once flirted with the notion that voting should be compulsory. But I quickly rejected the idea, based on the principle that democracy means having the right not to take part, as well as the right to get involved. If people don’t want their voice to be heard, that’s up to them.

For the whole of history, politicians have been depicted as venal, dishonest hypocrites. And politics itself has been seen as a necessary evil. Come to think of it, not even that necessary, sometimes.

But if you listen to some of the critics today, you might be tempted to believe that it’s only under Labour in the past decade – and especially since the expenses scandal – that the public have decided they distrust politicians. Before then, politicians were adored and venerated; political satire didn’t exist until 1997 and MPs were treated like gods in their constituencies…

There have always been – and will always be – those who look at any political system and find it wanting. Only a perfect system, designed according to their own personal predilections and preferences, would be good enough to merit their participation. So they walk away, while others engage anyway.

How do you distinguish between the positive abstainers and those who simply don’t care and can’t be bothered? And should we even bother to distinguish?

A standing committee on which I once sat heard an argument (I think it was from David Wilshire MP, but if my recollection is wrong, then I apologise) in favour of a “None of the above” option on the ballot paper. Complete nonsense, of course, and I’m still unsure whether David (or whoever) actually meant the proposal to be taken seriously.

George Robertson, the former Defence Secretary and Secretary General of Nato, once had to inspect the spoiled ballot papers after the count in his Hamilton constituency. On one paper, instead of placing a cross, a voter had written beside George’s name, in tiny letters: “They’re all bastards but he’s less of a bastard than the others”. George made the case to the returning officer that, since the voter had expressed a preference for a single candidate, albeit in an unconventional way, the vote should be counted as a vote for him. It was.

I have a similar tale from the last election, although you would have to be a fan of the BBC Scotland comedy Chewin’ the Fat to get the joke. I was number 3 on a ballot paper which featured five names. Someone had written “wank” against numbers 1, 2 and 4 and had written “good guy” against my name. I therefore argued that the vote was mine, since a preference had been clearly expressed. Unfortunately, since the voter had placed no mark against number 5 on the paper, the returning officer ruled the voter’s intentions were ambiguous and so the paper remained officially spoiled.

The point being that there are already ways of indicating that you are a disgruntled voter, rather than just staying away on polling day. Spoiled ballot papers are counted – abstentions are not. A “None of the above” option would be nothing more than a gimmick – great for the media and for the anti-politics brigade but proving nothing, and improving even less.

EVERYONE else is doing one of these, so I thought I’d give it a go:

• Labour will be returned for a fourth consecutive term of office, with a reduced majority.

• I will not be invited to return to ministerial office.

• David Cameron will not resign as Tory leader, but will face a challenge before the end of the year.

• William Hague will announce he’s stepping down as an MP.
  

• A football team somewhere will win a big cup.

• But it won’t be the England national team, I’m afraid.

• The critics will be pleasantly surprised by Matt Smith in Doctor Who.

• At least one major national newspaper will go under.

• A frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012 will emerge, but it won’t be Sarah Palin. Dammit.

• I will finally get my 3000th follower on Twitter.

• The SNP’s independence referendum Bill will fall. Hooray!

• Dan Hannan will announce he intends to become an MP. David Cameron will pretend to be pleased.
  

• All sides will be annoyed by the conclusions of the Iraq inquiry.

YOU know that something’s up when Jonathan Isaby of conservativehome calls you late on a Sunday evening. News of a developing political scandal, perhaps? An invitation to one of his frequent and excellent parties?

No, but a subject of import, nevertheless – specifically, how to save general election night. As The Sunday Times reported yesterday, an increasing number of killjoys council chiefs are planning to postpone their local counts until the day after polling, thereby killing any sense of excitement that traditionally surrounds the most important night in the political calendar.

Jonathan gives his own excellent reasons for opposing this move in the Facebook group he has set up (and I would urge you to join). But my own reasons for wanting the counts to happen as soon as the polls close are:

• personal – no candidate wants to be forced to wait an extra excruciating number of hours before finding out his fate. It’s just not fair; and
• spectacle – how many people have been turned on to politics by the drama and tension of a Thursday nigh election count? That would be utterly lost if we couldn’t find out the results until the following afternoon while everyone’s at work.

In fact that last reason is why I’m also opposed to electronic counting in the National Lottery style: can you imagine how dull it would be if, when the polls closed at ten, David Dimbleby, instead of giving us an exit poll result, told us what the precise actual result of the general election was?

General election only happen every four or five years. Is it really too much to ask that counts actually take place in the same way they’ve been carried out for generations?

SOCIALISM.

There, I’ve said it.

But what is a socialist? Believe it or not, in the 1980s, when I first joined the Labour Party, this was a question that comrades actually used to discuss seriously, earnestly and regularly. And in every local party there was never a shortage of individuals who took it upon themselves to judge which of their colleagues were and were not socialists.

Tony Benn, the font of all knowledge when it came to judging other people’s principles, once said that the Labour Party wasn’t a socialist party, although there were socialists in it, just as the church wasn’t Christian, although there were Christians in it. This struck a chord with me, because, as a young Christian in an evangelical church, I had all too often fallen into the trap of deciding whether others were “proper” born-again Christians or, as my friends and I very patronisingly caled them, “nominal” Christians. Essentially, if other people hadn’t shared in exactly the same spiritual experience that we had, then their faith was inferior to ours.

So yes — in response to that muffled comment from the back — I was even more arrogant and insufferable then than I am now.

I’ve since reconciled myself to the truth that it’s not up to anyone else to judge my own relationship with God, just as it’s not up to me to judge anyone else’s. As I’ve said on this blog before, I’ve always been a rubbish Christian anyway.

So what is it with the church and the political Left that it attracts people only too keen to judge others’ beliefs? I guess it comes from the fact that both Christianity (and any other religion) and socialism are based on faith — faith in God or, in socialism’s case, faith in the basic good of mankind, in moral absolutes and in economic concepts.  Once those beliefs are codified and acknowledged as The Truth, it becomes easy to identify those who stray from the One True Path.

The political Right is blissfully unencumbered by such rule books, preferring a more pragmatic approach to politics.

And even today, 15 years after the advent of New Labour, there are still those in my party who like to obsess about the “socialist” label. Among some, it is undoubtedly a cause of some resentment that it was Tony Blair who first inserted the word “socialist” in the party’s constitution, thereby redefining it in a broader, vaguer but more inclusive sense.

So the question is: do I consider myself a socialist? Yes, I suppose I do, but there are plenty of others who wouldn’t agree with that description of me. And maybe they’re right. Whatever.

Same goes for me describing myself as a Christian.

But if judging others’ definitions of themselves is your “thing”, who am I to tell you what to do?

NATURALLY I share the sentiments of everyone who was appalled at two BNP MEPs being elected last week.

But this is not the way to deal with them. It just gives them even more publicity than they’ve received already and makes them look like victims. And they’re not victims, they’re fascists.

Democracy sometimes throws up uncomfortable results. As I’ve said here before, the election of fascists at some point or other was always on the cards once we decided to introduce proportional representation for the European elections. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised that it’s actually happened.

But democracy also demands that those who are elected on a free vote, however obnoxious those individuals are, should be able to go about their lawful business without the stupid student politics antics like we’ve seen today.

The BNP press office couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.

THIS just in from a commenter:

Zimbabwe UK! From Guido

UKIP are complaining that ballot papers are being handed out folded over and people don’t realise their name is over the fold. Supporters are complaining to their party HQ that UKIP were not on the ballot paper…

He’s unnervingly right, you know. The thousands of political refugees who have claimed asylum in Britain in recent years rarely mention the murders, rapes, beatings, intimidation and land-grabs.

No, no, no… It was the insistence by Harare returning officers on folding ballot papers that finally persuaded them to jump in the back of that lorry for the 3000-mile journey to Blighty…

BELIEVE me, it is very difficult these days to try to motivate party activists to go out door-knocking, and I know this is not a problem confined to the Labour Party.

Party membership, and particularly party campaigning, is a voluntary activity. Those who join and want to get involved at a local level in the Labour or Conservative or LibDem parties do so for mostly altruistic reasons: they want to make a contribution to making thinghs better and they feel they can do this by promoting the policies of one particular party. They give up a lot of their spare time to sit in drafty community centres of a Thursday evening, listening to councillors give long and detailed reports while others are sitting comfortably at home with their families watching telly.

Party activists make sacrifices – of their time, their money, their shoe leather and their patience. And in the last few weeks many of them will be wondering why they bothered.

This Thursday will be a difficult day for Labour, according to all the polls. But it will also be bad, to a greater or lesser degree, for British politics.

But here’s the truth: after all the scandal and the dishonesty and the resignations and the refusals to resign, the indignation and the public fury… after all that, politics is still worth the candle. I would today still urge young people not just to become involved in “politics” – which is too often shorthand for a non-party campaign or movement – but to join a political party, to work for a candidate and yes, to become a candidate themselves one day, even to become a Member of Parliament.

Because that’s still the best way to make a political contribution, even with all the compromises and concessions that are necessarily a part of party politics and which have always been intrinsic to it.

As for Labour, I still fervently believe that we deserve the public’s support more than any other party. At both local and European level, we have shown that we have the individual talent as well as the policy and agenda to make things better for the people of this country.

Please vote on Thursday. British politics can deliver and it deserves another chance.

And vote Labour.

THERE’S a well-worn quote which been used by various people down the years to illustrate the attitude of the Conservative Party to public transport:

Any man who finds himself on a bus after the age of 30 can count himself a failure.

It’s almost always attributed to Baroness Thatcher and in years gone by I have blithely used it to make the (quite legitimate) point that public transport, and particularly the bus industry, has never been at the top of the Tories’ agenda.

But just last year I began to voice my doubts about the veracity of the attribution. Something about the quote just didn’t seem right, politically helpful though it was. Mrs Thatcher had many faults, but she was surely too astute a politician to express publicly anything so crass and patronising.

So grateful thanks to Sebastian Shakespeare who, in today’s Notebook in the Evening Standard, provides some much-needed clarity. He confirms that the originator of the quote is not Thatcher but  Loeila, Duchess of Westminster.

Unless someone somewhere can come up with a more authoritative source confirming the quote as Thatcher’s, I will have to formally decree her to be innocent of concocting such a smear against the travelling (male, over-30s) public.

THERE is a big difference between “attack” and “smear” when it comes to blogs. And there is a difference between smearing and negative campaigning.

Let me make my own position clear: negative campaigning is a necessary and inevitable part of politics. You have to attack your political opponents. For a start, you owe it to the electorate to expose your opponents’ failings. Secondly, if you don’t attack them, they will attack you first.

A lot of guff has been written and spoken in recent weeks about how we have to lift political debate up out of the sewer, and other such plumbing-related metaphors. We’re now in danger of being accused of “smearing” whenever we raise a word of criticism about our opponents. Smeargate has been awful to behold, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater (continuing with those plumbing-related metaphors). 

A commenter contacted me in the last week to point out that in his recent successful presidential campaign, Barack Obama spent more money on negative campaigning than on positive campaigning. That does not mean that he bought advertising space to attack Cindy McCain for her history of drug addiction or to smear Senator McCain for fathering an illegitimate child (the tactics of McCain’s Republican opponents during the presidential primaries in 2000). Had Obama done so, he would have proved himself unworthy of the office he now holds. But he didn’t; he did what all candidates have to do and exposed the weaknesses of his opponent’s policies. And thank goodness he did.

So I think Iain Dale was wrong when he equated the attack blogs A Leaky Chanter and Aneurin Glyndwyr with the late and not-very-lamented Red Rag smear blog.

I genuinely have no idea who set up either site (it wisnae me, in case you’re wondering), but there is clearly a place for blogs which concentrate on the weak spots of their political opponents. A Leaky Chanter has a link to the very funny “Richt Honourable Alex Salmond” Twitterfeed, featuring such memorable updates as “wants a G183 so he can go to big important meetings too. Not fair.”

Most of the stuff on A Leaky Chanter is in the same vein — irreverent, funny and merciless (although I do think it’s completely unfair and unwise to attack Salmond on his expenses — a cheap shot which can be aimed — and will be, no doubt — at any MP of any party. But then, as an MP, I would say that, wouldn’t I?).

The half-hearted attempt by the SNP to add a tartan fringe to Smeargate can be easily dismissed.  SNP MP Angus MacNeil’s claim that A Leaky Chanter is a “Labour-linked blog” is based on nothing more than the fact that it’s on my blogroll! Based on that logic, Guido, Iain Dale, Dizzy Thinks, ConservativeHome and Gallifrey One are all “Labour linked” sites…

An “attack blog” is a completely different animal from the kind of smear blog that McBride and Draper were planning to set up. By all means attack your opponents’ policies, but when you attack our families, or invent stuff to attack, you’ve crossed the line. And you’ve exposed yourself for having nothing of substance to attack on. And that means you’ve lost the argument, and deservedly so.