'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

Boris Coup: Day 10

Day 10. And Boris keeps giving the lie to Karl Marx, who talked about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. With Boris, it happens only once, is a farce throughout but is perfectly likely to end as tragedy.

A tragedy for him perhaps. At least, we should hope so. Otherwise it could be one for the rest of us.

BoJo: not so happy these days

Let’s see what he’s been up to.

Well, he’s had to contend with more resistance to his high-handed behaviour, in particular his expelling of Conservative MPs for voting against him. The worst resistance came from his brother Jo, who will stand down as an MP as well as a minister, because of the “unresolvable tension” between loyalty to his family (i.e. his brother) and the national interest. How tough it must be to have your own brother declare your actions not in the national interest...

Boris laughed at Ed Miliband’s victory over his brother David for the Labour leadership back in 2013:

...only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother

It seems that fraternal shafting isn’t restricted only to the left after all.

What else has Boris been doing? 

He attended a police training academy in Wakefield, in the North of England. The understanding was that it would be a celebration of his decision to recruit another 20,000 police officers, without a word of politics being breathed. But Boris treated that as a firm commitment, so he broke it.

First he kept the police officers and trainees waiting an hour, standing around in the sun. A fine illustration of how deeply he cares about ordinary people. Then he made a wholly political speech, part of his campaign for an election which, much to his frustration, he hasn’t yet been able to call.

In true Trump style, he took advantage of having police as a backdrop to make the speech. Something the police themselves resented, since they value their reputation, or at least the appearance, of being politically neutral. But Boris doesn’t pay much attention to protocol and procedure. If the regulations get in his way, he simply ignores them.

It was the same when he was an undergraduate in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University: if he felt like trashing a restaurant, he just did it. Mere conventions suggesting that kind of behaviour was unacceptable were never going to deter him then. They don’t deter him now.

It’s interesting that he’s campaigning for an election, given that one of the votes he lost in Parliament, as I mentioned yesterday, was a motion to call a poll. The latest news is that the Opposition parties don’t intend to give him that election until after the Brexit date.

That’s more bad news for poor Boris. A new poll by ICM for Represent Us, a group campaigning for a second referendum, suggests that the Brexit Party’s vote would double from 9 to 18% if an election were held after 31 October and Britain still hadn’t left the EU. That would leave Corbyn and Johnson level pegging on 28%, whereas in an earlier election BoJo would be ahead by 37 to 30% (according to the Financial Times, which has a paywall).

No wonder the Opposition parties want the vote in November.

Especially as the Lords have now ratified the bill requiring BoJo to delay Brexit if he hasn’t negotiated a new deal by Halloween. “I’d rather be dead in a ditch,” he told the Guardian when asked whether he’d request a delay in Brexit.

He keeps claiming he’s making good progress towards a deal, but since the EU says there’s been no progress at all, like the boy who cried wolf, Boris finds few who believe him.

So he could be heading for 31 October with no deal. Then his choice would be to ask the EU for a delay to Brexit, and comply with the new law. Or he could break the law, which would be a serious extension to his coup and might have some difficult consequences. Or of course he could die in a ditch.

By happy chance, it seems that Parliament may well be digging one for him.

Labour: read the writing on the wall!

It’s said that one of the worst problems with having your back to the wall is that you can’t see the writing on it.

Following the local elections in Britain, the writing is in letters a metre high for the Labour Party. The say, “you’ve been weighed and found wanting. You’re driving straight at a cliff edge”.

Labour no longer controls a single council in Scotland, once its bastion. In terms of councillors, it has fewer even than the Conservatives. Seven years ago, the Conservatives seemed to be a spent force in Scotland; today they are resurgent.

In Wales, which Labour has dominated for a century, it has lost over a fifth of its councillors and control of three councils out of the ten it had before.

It was beaten to the new mayoralties in Tees Valley and the West Midlands in England, both in areas that would once have been regarded as heartlands for the Party. Overall, the pollsters and academics were seriously wrong in their forecast for Labour in England: they predicted losses of as many as 75 council seats. In the event, the Party has lost 145.

Tories exultant as the victories keep flowing in

Reading the writing is no good if your back is firmly to the wall. But the problem is far worse than that. A majority of Party members, representing a tiny proportion of voters as these results show, is determined to cover its eyes with virtual reality goggles. Those goggles show them a sunlit upland where voters are charmed by the honesty and integrity of the present Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and impressed by his commitment to justice and decency, backing his policies in droves until they project him into Downing Street.

It’s a fairy tale that many of us might like to subscribe to. But it has nothing to do with the painful reality that the local election results reveal. Labour does not win power with its traditional bedrock so completely eroded.

Now this is not all down to Corbyn. The decline started under his two predecessors as leader, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Both were poor leaders – Brown had been a fine Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was far too gaffe-prone to lead the party; Miliband was simply gaffe-prone. Corbyn supporters keep pointing out to me how weak they’d been and how the rot had set in on their watch, and that’s true.

However, the implication behind these criticisms is that Corbyn would turn things around. Indeed, he was uniquely qualified to do so. His political persona made him the best choice to right the ship and get it back on course.

What the local election results have shown is how wrong this view was, how justified that of the people who tried to prise the leadership from Corbyn’s grip. Far from turning things around, he has made a bad situation far worse. Instead of bringing a breath of fresh air to the party, he has merely continued the decline from Brown to Miliband, making him the weakest of three weak leaders.

The sad truth is that the virtual reality goggles are still firmly in place. In only one way is Corbyn an innovator: he is the first Labour leader who takes no responsibility for the disasters that happen on his watch. The poor performance is all down to the Parliamentary Labour Party that rebelled against him – although the election results only show how legitimate their aims were – or the media, or even the vile behaviour of the Conservative Party (which seems unfairly committed to the notion of what is known, technically, as “winning”).

His supporters simply can’t read the writing on the wall. It will take a huge effort to get them to abandon the comfort of their nice goggles. But the attempt must be made, yet again.

Because it really, seriously, does say on that wall: “you’re heading straight for a precipice. Change driver!”

Labour and the coming general election: the context

As we in the British Labour Party prepare for our next general election, on 8 June, it struck me as interesting to look at the others there have been since the end of the Second World War. We are, after all, in a sense still living the post-War era, at least insofar as there has not been such a violent shock in the evolution of society as that war produced. Not yet, anyway, even if Donald Trump’s working on it.

There have been eleven leaders of the Labour Party in that time, not counting deputies who have acted as leader while a new one was being elected (George Brown, Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman twice). Of the eleven, nine have fought at least one general election; John Smith sadly died before he could, and Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader, is about to face his first.

Elections, how Labour did, under which leader
Victories in red, defeats in blue
Worst result in black, best in orange

The table shows how they have all fared.

Curiously, since 1945, Labour has only lost one more election than it has won (nine victories to ten defeats). However, it has managed to hang on to power significantly less successfully than the Conservatives: of the nearly 72 years since the war ended, Labour has held power for only about 30.

The Tories have moulded the era in which we live far more than Labour has.

Of all the elections it contested in that time, Labour reached its nadir in 1983, under Michael Foot, when it won just 209 seats. Under Neil Kinnock, it gradually rebuilt its fortunes in 1987 and 1992, until it achieved its biggest success under Tony Blair in 1997, winning 418 seats – curiously, precisely double the number won under Foot.

Almost as spectacular as Blair’s success of 1997 was his victory four years later, when he won 412 seats, with Attlee’s landslide in 1945 and Wilson’s in 1966 (393 and 363 seats respectively) close behind.

At the other end of the scale, the number of seats won by Labour fell at both of the last two general elections, until under Miliband in 2015, it reached 232, just 23 more than Foot took in 1983.

So that’s a little context. The obvious question is will the trend reverse in 2017? Will Corbyn, like Kinnock, put the party on a road back up towards power? Or will he merely continue the downward trend from Brown to Miliband? Will he move us off the bottom or, conversely, set a new post-War low?

I shall be out canvassing with other members to ensure that we achieve the former outcome rather than the latter. The polls are against us but the polls can be bucked. Seven weeks from now, we’ll know whether we’ve pulled off that trick.

Drive people to despair and they do desperate things

Many of those US blue-collar workers, the natural constituency of the Democratic Party, who voted for Trump were driven by anger and frustration. Many find that even holding down two or three jobs, they still can’t make ends meet. Feeling let down by the system as it is, and feeling that the leaders they previously trusted are simply part of that same system, they turned to a more radical alternative.

In Britain, seven million people are now in precarious employment. They are in jobs in which they have no guaranteed hours, but they still have to make themselves available, with no assurance that they will be given anything to do or any pay for doing it. Others are given workloads that are all but impossible to clear, or require multiple hours of unpaid overtime to finish. It’s become easy and the norm for companies that hit any kind of financial problem to shed staff, so executives who have failed to achieve their own, often deeply unrealistic targets, can make others take the fall for their poor decisions.

We haven’t yet had a Trump in Britain. What we have had, however, is nearly seven years of government by the Conservative Party, alone (now) or as the dominant partner in a coalition (up to 2015). In its early days, it liked to claim that “we’re all in this together”. Now, under new management, the government claims to want to assist the “just about managing” or “JAMs”, the very people driven to desperation in the States, the ones who have to swim with all their strength to keep their noses just below water.

A new study shows, however, that without a major change of course, life for the JAMs is likely to get harder to the tune of £2500 a year less income by 2020. For all the pledges, desperation is set to increase for the already desperate.

If that kind of despair gave us Trump in the States, it’s likely to have as damaging an effect in Britain too. Or in France, where Le Pen lies in wait, or the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders is the likely beneficiary, or in a host of other countries where the far right is building a head of steam.

As American voters will discover over the next four years, the sad truth is that the leaders who come up with the simple answers – “get out of the European Union”, “drain the swamp”, “build a wall” – only make matters far worse for the very group that puts them in power.

What’s the alternative?

It has to be a leadership as radical and inspiring as Trump’s, but genuinely committed and not merely committed in words, to addressing the problems of those who are suffering such hardship today – and far worse hardship tomorrow. Unfortunately, in most countries those who should be providing that kind of leadership seem, like Hillary Clinton, to be tied to the system that creates the problem and unable to inspire confidence in those they ought to be representing.

The Democrats in the US are facing a particularly toxic Republican in the White House, whose party controls both Houses of Congress and will entrench a majority that shares its views in the Supreme Court.

The Socialist Party in France has led a failed government and is now expected to go down to comprehensive defeat in elections next year.

In Britain, the unions inflicted on the Labour Party a leader, Ed Miliband, who was likeable and intelligent, but could never convince voters that he could be Prime Minister. Now a majority of Labour’s membership has elected Jeremy Corbyn, not once but twice. He too seems likeable and intelligent; he certainly has a radical message but seems not to be getting it through to anything like sufficient numbers: Labour is languishing ten to fourteen points behind the Conservative Party, far too wide a margin to be attributed to the simple and now notorious inability of polling organisations to achieve accuracy.

Homelessness, on the rise in Britain, as is the use of food banks

Worse off by £2500 a year, by 2020. That represents around 10% of the median income in Britain today. A drop of that scale will drive up homelessness, hunger and disease among people who are already struggling. That is the price being paid by those least able to pay any price at all.

And it’s the price of Labour’s failure to win traction in the electorate. It underlines the urgency of addressing that problem today. For a lot of people, not just in Britain but across the developed world, tomorrow may be far worse.

As the election of Trump demonstrates.

Great advice, showing exactly what Labour shouldn't do.

Labour was warned in plenty of time, we’re told, that it was heading for a drubbing at the polls. According to the Guardian, James Morris, chief pollster to the party under Ed Miliband, reported that:

There were three very clear threshold issues where the party needs to show a new approach: immigration, benefits and the deficit/economy.

On the first of these, Morris provided useful detail:

Labour is seen as having consistently ignored English people’s views on immigration. A Labour leader who wants to show change has to show that they understand that. This is not just an issue for lost working-class voters – it was central to Middle England and a major concern for Lib Dems. Out of the 40 people who took part in the groups only one person mounted any sort of defence of a relatively open policy on immigration.

The concerns were broad. Among C2s and Ds there was a particular concern about competition from eastern European migrants for work (esp in the trades). There was a universal concern about benefits and the provision of services, with immigrants sending child benefit abroad symbolic of the issue. Just as common was a cultural concern. This was partly about people adopting British culture when they come here and partly about standing up for British and in particular English traditions and English people. There was a strong sense that people who are born and bred in England should be prioritised.

So according to Morris we lost because, among other things, we failed to accommodate the fact that a great many people in Middle England feel their jobs, or even their cultural identity, threatened by the influx of immigrants to this country.

A lot of people issue this kind of warning. It usually takes the form “we have to learn to take voters’ concerns about immigration seriously.” That’s actually code: what it means is that we have to adopt those concerns as our own, to make ourselves attractive to voters who feel them.

What about “cultural concern”? This was perhaps best voiced by the politician who complained about finding himself in a train carriage without a single other English speaker in it. The same politician also pointed out that few of us would want Romanian neighbours.

The politician who made those two comments was Nigel Farage, leader of far-right UKIP. It concerns me that a Labour Party pollster might be recommending moving closer to the kinds of positions that Farage espouses.

Personally, I always find a charm in being surrounded by people speaking other languages, since it shows what a magnet Britain can be at its best. As for Romanian neighbours, I’m delighted with out Polish neighbours and I have a close and much appreciated Romanian friend. People who share Farage’s view of foreigners, far from being emulated, should perhaps be encouraged to be more tolerant and enlightened.

Incidentally, doing that is what we call leadership. Adopting their views is followership. What Labour needs to do above all else is learn to lead. It used to know what that meant, and it badly needs to find out again.

In any case, on the subject of leadership, what Morris fails to take into account is that large swaths of voters are unmoved by policy. We have to have policies in place, because they are our pledges of what we shall do – or at least attempt to do – if put into office. But people who are genuinely interested in policy are primarily insiders and a relative small band of others who follow politics with enthusiasm.

As we know, the vast majority of the electorate is completely switched off from politics, and that means switched off from policies.

Ed Miliband: likeable, bright, honest
But not perceived as a Prime Minister. That was the problem, not policy

What will enthuse those people is a sense of confidence, and better still inspiration, in the leadership of the party. They have to feel that they can see the leader in Downing Street. I doubt many of the policies that Ed Miliband promoted cost him votes; his inability to eat a bacon roll in front of the cameras, or to remember the key passages of a crucial speech, did far more to shake the confidence of huge numbers who therefore thought Cameron was simply more suitable.

No amount of triangulation, of selection of carefully crafted policies that will please the maximum number of people for most of the time, will address that problem. For that we need a person who, with or without justification, will be trusted with the keys of number 10.

So my view is simple. If we lose an election because we refuse to compromise on matters of fundamental principle, for instance because we will simply not accommodate the views on immigrants peddled by a Farage, then fair enough. There’s a majority against us on a matter on which we can’t budge.

We need to be convinced that on such questions, we really won’t ever budge, whatever the siren voices may be saying, even the siren voices of pollsters.

If, however, we lose because we have saddled ourselves with a leader who simply can’t connect with ordinary people, then that’s an altogether different matter. That’s our fault. It’s dumb and unforgivable.

Now that, James Morris, is the problem we need to fix. Policy is secondary. And compromising on principles is intolerable.

Too soon to write off Labour. If we learn our lessons

There seem to be frequent reports at the moment of the death of the British Labour Party. I’m inclined to consider them greatly exaggerated.

Listening to a recent programme on the BBC – What’s Left, chaired by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley – I was amused to hear speakers declaring the 2015 results the worst for Labour since 1918. Two of the panel were Labour MPs, the rest journalists or academics. Even the MPs shared the doom-laden view.

It just feels way over the top to me. Certainly, it was a lamentable result. We were beaten, and still worse, we weren’t even able to prevent David Cameron and his Tories winning an overall majority – right up to polling day, the opinion polls were suggesting he would at most emerge as leader of the biggest single party in parliament, only able to cobble together a minority administration. Instead, he took a small but working majority.

So it was lousy. But the detail suggests things were less dire than the prophets of doom claim. Perhaps I should say, like to claim.

Labour’s share of the vote was actually up on 2010. By only 1.4%, it’s true, which is anaemic, but that was marginally more than the Tories managed – they only increased their share by 0.8%. That still left them 6.5% ahead of Labour, which is certainly a sound defeat, but hardly catastrophic.

The biggest failure of Labour was to protect its Scottish heartland. From 40 seats in Scotland, it feel to just 1. Hugely damaging. On the other hand, overall it lost only 24 seats – in other words, outside Scotland it added 15 seats to its tally. With Scotland still heading inexorably for independence, Labour was going to have to wean itself from its reliance on Scotland in any case. The fact that it has been able to increase its number of seats in England and Wales is a necessary step towards guaranteeing its long-term success.

And let’s not forget that Labour hadn’t put itself in the best possible position to win. Ed Miliband is principled, insightful and probably great company. But he’s virtually unelectable: he’s accident-prone, constantly making disastrous gaffes, and with his lieutenant Ed Balls, apparently unable ever to get off any fence. They would repeatedly dodge the hard questions, preferring to appear a little Tory to Tories, a little socialist to lefties, and convincing nobody.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall
Will one of them turn Labour's fortunes round as the next leader?

Peter Mandelson rightly points out in today’s Observer that, under their leadership, they failed to answer such opportunistic policies as Chancellor George Osborne’s proposal to devolve more authority to local government in the North of England. That was a policy Labour should have adopted before the Tories, but it failed either to adopt it or to respond to it. The result? Losses to the Tories in the North, another heartland area, including Ed Balls’s own seat, and deep inroads by another adversary, the far-right UKIP.

If despite these self-inflicted handicaps, Labour could still improve its standing outside Scotland by fifteen seats, and marginally improve its popular vote, what could it do with a more effective, more dynamic and, above all, more assertive leadership?

It strikes me that this is no time to throw one’s arms up in despair and talk about defeat on a historically unprecedented scale. Instead it’s time to take stock sensibly of where we stand, without understating the scale of the debacle but also without ignoring the more reasons for encouragement. And make sure we never again saddle ourselves with leaders so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the day.

Because if we shoot ourselves in the foot like that again, then we would indeed be in serious trouble.

A very British spaghetti Western: the good, the sly and the downright inept

I spent the first couple of hours after the BBC exit poll for the UK General Election was announced at 10:00 last night doubting its accuracy. I wasn’t alone: former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown publicly swore to eat his hat on live TV if it were proved right. Fortunately for him the exit poll did indeed prove wrong. Unfortunately, things turned out to be even worse than it suggested.

What? What? The Tories on 316 seats?
I couldn't believe the scale of the victory

The next hour or so I spent trying to adjust my mindset to a completely different outcome from anything I’d been expecting. For weeks – months even – we’d all been forecasting a hung parliament (no party with an overall majority) and weeks of negotiations to put a coalition together to govern the country. That’s what the polls were telling us, after all.

Incidentally, I don’t believe the polls were wrong. What seems to happen is that a small but crucial number of people tell pollsters that they plan to vote Labour. They may not even be lying. That may be their intention when they say it. But then they go into the polling station and vote Tory.

In my mind, these so-called “shy Tories” are people who feel they really ought to vote Labour, perhaps because they know it represents their interests. So that’s what they tell the polling organisations.

But the Labour leaders are not unlike the Tories: educated at similar schools and universities, less wealthy perhaps but still far wealthier than anyone on the median wage or less. In the loneliness of the polling booth they think about these two sets of people, both representatives of what they may perceive as a kind of master class. If they are to choose one such person, why not make it the one born and bred to be a master – in other words, a Tory?

The final batch of polls had the following standings for the main parties on the eve of the election:

• Lord Ashcroft: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• Ipsos MORI: Conservative 36%, Labour 35%
• Populus: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• ICM: Conservative 34%, Labour 35%

All tight. And all of them adding up to a total, for the two main parties, of 66-71%.

The actual result was Conservative 38%, Labour 31%. A total of 69%, but a substantial lead to the Tories. All it takes, however, to get there from what the polls were showing is a switch by about 3-4% of the electorate. That’s probably about the extent of the “shy Tories” out there, and they determined the outcome last night.

It’s against that background that I set my British Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Sly, the Inept.

First, the good. That has to be the Scottish National Party, the SNP, and its leader Nicola Sturgeon who had an excellent campaign – rewarded by a near clean sweep of Scotland. There was a time that we in the Labour Party would laugh at the Tories for having only one Scottish seat. Now the laugh’s against us: as well as the Tories, we too, as well as the Liberal Democrats, only have a single Scottish seat.

The other 56 have been won by the SNP. It has even managed to win the election of the youngest MP for 350 years, Mhairi Black, a twenty-year old student who has to fit in finishing her degree in the next few weeks, around taking up her newly-won position at Westminster. She unseated Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Douglas Alexander, in Paisley and Renfrewshire South.

Next, the Sly. This is the only prediction I got remotely right. The Tories are like the Sandman: get too close and you’re likely to fall asleep. Back in 2010, when they didn’t have enough seats to form a government, they approached the Liberal Democrats who then had 57 seats, to join them in coalition. The Lib Dems said yes, much to the amazement of many of us who had regarded them as a party of the centre-left, much more naturally allied to Labour than to the Conservatives.

We predicted that the electorate would take a terrible vengeance on them, reducing their numbers to a level from which it would be impossible to recoer for a generation. Even so, again guided by polls, most of us felt that they might hang on to 20-30 seats. In fact, they now have just eight. Some of the party’s biggest hitters have gone, including David Laws, one of the main architects of the coalition. The leader Nick Clegg clung on, but he’s leader no more, having resigned this morning.

And finally, the Inept. My own party. Our arcane constitution allowed the Trade Unions to foist on us a leader, Ed Miliband, who is I’m sure immensely likeable, principled, honest, decent and lots of other great things. But a no leader. He appointed as his Finance spokesman Ed Balls, and together they crafted a message to the effect that they, like the Tories, would impose a policy of austerity, but they’d do it more nicely.

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP pointed out that this stance presented the British electorate with the choice between Tory austerity, and Labour austerity-lite. Not exactly inspiring.

Working to get out the vote around Luton, I had someone tell me that she had voted Labour, but against her instincts – she felt little confidence in the party. One even said that she might not vote at all, because Labour hadn’t cleansed itself of the Blairite tendency that took us into war in Iraq.

As Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon’s predecessor as leader of the SNP, last night told TV presenter Jeremy Paxman in a master class on how to handle aggressive questioning, if Ed Miliband had “fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.” Indeed. Though he might also have had to learn to handle the media the way Salmond and Sturgeon do.

Well, that’s all in the past now. Ed Miliband has also stepped down. And Ed Balls was defeated for re-election in his parliamentary seat.

Crafted the economic policy that contributed to Labour defeat
And paid by being beaten himself

They always say businesses should hire slow and fire fast. Labour elected Miliband to the leadership rather quickly. It became clear soon after that he wasn’t going to inspire enough of the electors he needed to reach. But we fired him slow. It took four years for him to go, and the price for the generosity which let him have a go at becoming Prime Minister is going to be paid by a lot of other people, during five years of continued Tory rule.

Italian spaghetti Westerns leave you feeling entertained. This British one, on the other hand, leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. I suppose it’s like the contrast in weather between the two countries.

Alas, poor Tories, and poor us: the lesson of Hallam

With just a day to go before the British General Election, there are a whole series of seats which are promising us “Portillo moments.” The term refers to former Thatcherite Minister Nigel Portillo. In 1997, he was beaten in an extremely safe seat, Enfield Southgate, to much rejoicing at the downfall of this notorious right-winger.

It’s unfortunate that such upsets are now named after him. Since leaving politics, he’s turned into rather a good broadcaster, taking honest, well-argued and – frankly – frequently liberal stances on a wide range of questions.

Still, there are still such upsets, many of which would be highly welcome if they occurred. 

It would be wonderful to see Nigel Farage of the dangerously far-right United Kingdom Independence Party losing his bid to enter Parliament in Thanet South. Equally, there would be a sense of Karma if the constituency of Sheffield Hallam waved goodbye to Nick Clegg, whose support for the Tories – in breach, many would argue, of fundamental principles of the Liberal Democrat Party he leads – made the government of the last few years possible.

Possible isn’t the same as bearable.

The reality is that Clegg will probably hang on in Hallam. In fact, the latest constituency poll, carried out by ICM for the Guardian suggests that he has a comfortable lead – 42% over 35%. Curiously, the second-placed party, historically in Hallam David Cameron’s Tories, is now Ed Miliband’s Labour Party. The Tories, indeed, are down to 12%.

Nick Clegg: unlikely to lose his seat
But the way he retains it may be highly instructive...

Hold on a minute, though. As well as asking whether voters would choose Clegg or one of the other candidates, ICM asked them to say which party they preferred. Which gave substantially different results.

To that question, Hallam voters split 34% for Labour, 32% for the Liberal Democrats, and 21% for the Conservatives. A 2% lead for Labour. That’s pretty much in line with the previous poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft.

A fascinating picture emerges from all this, doesn’t it?

What it says is that Labour supporters show some real conviction. Between the two questions, the Labour vote stayed practically unchanged. But of those who prefer the Tories, nearly half chose Clegg when they were asked about specific candidates.

That rather suggests a lot of Tories have identified Nick Clegg as a natural friend. A great many of us would say they’re far from wrong. He certainly already seems to be angling for a new invitation into government from his mate big Dave. And now it seems it’s a substantial group of Dave’s supporters in Hallam who might give Clegg his constituency back.

The poll, however, also implies that rather a lot of Hallam Tories need to be reminded that Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, the man who kept their party in power for the last five years, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is their local MP. And standing for re-election. By them. 

One wonders how many, prompted with his name, responded “who?”

Not exactly on the ball, one would have to say.

It’s not my aim to be unduly mean, but I can’t help feeling that this reflects a level of intellectual horsepower which might make a lot of other complex ideas difficult to grasp. Like compassion. Tolerance of difference. Human rights.

And certainly anything sophisticated like social justice.

In turn, that might go a long way to explain a lot of our problems. With Tories. Far beyond Hallam.

Miliband rules out working with the SNP. Seriously?

Picture the situation. A series of curiously convenient deaths have left you on the threshold of power in your nation. You have only to step forward to take it – and yet there’s an obstacle. You don’t share the beliefs of the majority of your compatriots. They wouldn’t accept you unless you change your views.

So what do you do? Do you accommodate their deeply held feelings or do you stand on principle? Do you give up the hope of power or do you compromise and win it?

Henry, King of Navarre, thought long and hard and decided compromise was the best option. “Paris,” he famously declared, “is worth a mass” and converted from Protestantism, to accommodate the wishes of his predominantly Catholic new subjects. So he became King Henry IV of France.

A good thing, too, for his subjects as much as for him. There haven’t been that many good kings, but he was one. Both sides gained from the bargain.

Good king Henry of France, for whom Paris was worth a Mass

Now fast forward rather more than four centuries. Britain stands on the edge of what looks likely to be the tightest general election since mass suffrage was introduced. The Conservative-dominated coalition with the Liberal Democrats is massively discredited. Its core concern has been for austerity economics as a way of to solve the nation’s economic woes: painful but, they would argue, necessary.

Well, we’ve had plenty of suffering, particularly amongst the most vulnerable sections of society: the poor have lost most of the safety net they might occasionally need and, even worse, the disabled, the ill, those most in need of help, have had state support withdrawn. The pain has been real. The gain, on the other hand, has been far less obvious: growth remains sickly to say the least and, while employment has risen, much of it has been in the most precarious form possible – the zero-hour contract, tying a worker to an employer who makes no guarantee of either work or pay.

Ed Miliband: trying to make up for lost ground
He may have to agree to things he finds distasteful

Sadly, though Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour-led Opposition has had an excellent campaign over the last few weeks, over the previous few years, he’s led the attack on the Coalition to limited effect. There have been occasional flashes: he opposed military intervention in Syria and, I suspect to his surprise, saw his stance adopted first in Britain and then, astonishingly, even in the United States. A great triumph, avoiding at least one lamentable and probably catastrophic intervention in the Middle East.

Generally, though, his leadership and the role of his most senior subordinate, Ed Balls, has been littered with gaffes and errors. The result has been clear and obvious: I’ve had people who, in the past, have voted for a variety of parties – people free of the tribal attachment that I feel to just one party – the so-called floating voters who’ve told me categorically that, however sick they are of the Conservatives, they could not bring themselves to vote Labour under Miliband.

The result is that Labour is level-pegging with the Tories in the last week of the campaign. And might even emerge with slightly fewer than Members of Parliament than they have – because it has massively lost Scotland. That nation, which previously sent huge number of Labourites to Parliament, has swung overwhelmingly in favour of the Scottish Nationalist Party. This is principally a reaction to inept English reactions to the defeat of the referendum on Scottish independence in September. It was the Conservatives who reacted least well, but Labour has paid the steepest price.

Miliband has therefore set his sights on winning over support from disaffected Conservatives – rather belatedly if, as I suggest, he had put off most floating voters earlier. In order to win Conservatives, he finds himself trying to ape Tory stances – being evasive on immigration, for instance, and instead of opposing the painful policies of austerity, suggesting a slightly toned-down version of them.

But the biggest concession he is making to the Conservatives is that he’s writing off any possibility of a deal with the SNP. The Tories constantly try to frighten voters with the prospect of a Labour government dependent on SNP votes, a UK government dependent on a party that wants to leave the UK, and Miliband has responded by toughening his rejection of proposals for collaboration from Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader.

First he ruled out a formal coalition, which he hadn’t been offered in the first place.

Now he’s saying that he wouldn’t come to any kind of a deal. He would rather not form a government at all than lead one on that basis. Which suggests he would answer Sturgeon’s recent question to him, “is it the case that you would rather see David Cameron go back into Downing Street than work with me?” in the affirmative.

Nicola Sturgeon. Hardly an ogre
It might be messy to work with her – but the alternative is far worse

Working with the SNP would indeed be messy, particularly after having ruled the prospect out so emphatically, in words that could come back to haunt him. But do we really want to see David Cameron returned instead?

Which brings me back to Henry IV. He said that Paris was worth a mass. Well, I hope Miliband realises that Downing Street is worth a mess. 

If he doesn’t, he would go down in history as the man who saddled Britain with an inexorably ruthless Conservative government, when he could have taken power himself at the price of a compromise. And turned into a good Prime Minister as Henry became a good king: Miliband could well be a fine Labour Prime Minister though a poor campaigner, rather like Clement Attlee, one of the Labour greats.

Turning his back on the opportunity might prove far messier still than taking it. For him personally. And, sadly, even more for the rest of us.

Cameron's empty gimmick. But might it work?

It would appear that anxiety about the coming British General Election is intensifying in Tory ranks.

That’s odd, because frankly they’re not doing any worse than their main opposition, Labour. At times it looks as though they’re getting a tiny lead, at times as though Labour is. Basically, they’re tied. But I suppose that’s the trouble. Tories believe they have a God-given right to power; being tied with Labour is therefore an unacceptable dislocation to any kind of reality they can believe.

They’ve tried so many things. They tried personal attacks on Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, but those rather backfired. They’ve tried whipping up a panic over the prospect of Miliband forming a government dependent on support from the Scottish Nationalist Party, which at the moment looks like the only way he could, and presenting it as a pact with all the fiends in Hell.

Let me assure you, based on my many visits to Scotland, and conversations with SNP supporters, that they’re really not that fiendish at all. Indeed, compared to David Cameron and the Tories, they’re positively angelic.

None of this has dented Labour’s poll position.

So today we had the latest wheeze. Cameron proposed that, if returned, the Tories would legislate – legislate, mind: this is law they’d be making, not some kind of pious wish enshrined in a resolution – to rule out any kind of tax increase, on VAT, income tax or National Insurance, in the course of the next parliament.

It’s a glorious notion. The UK is a nation without a written constitution, unlike the US or Germany. So there’s no basic law that binds the legislators themselves. Law is made by Parliament and can be just as easily unmade by it. Or to put it in other words, the same body that made the law banning tax increases would also make any law to raise taxes. It can’t bind itself any more than a smoker can bind himself to keep his New Year’s resolution to stop smoking.

So Cameron’s pledge is nothing more than a promise to keep a promise. 

If we don’t believe his promise, which should we believe his promise to keep it?

Why wouldn’t we buy snake oil from this man?

Let’s not forget that before the last election he said he wouldn’t raise VAT. And then he did. He and George Osborne, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, as we quaintly refer to our Finance Minister, promised to eliminate the structural deficit on government spending in the last government (they’ve failed lamentably) and to be repaying debt by next year (there’s no chance they’ll be doing it, even if they get back in).

So, basically, the pledge is just an empty gimmick. It binds only anyone who believes it.

Sadly, those are precisely the people he’s aiming at.

Some have said that his empty promise shows disrespect for the electorate. It’s certainly disrespectful, but only to a small number of voters. The Tories and Labour are pretty well level-pegging, each with support hovering between 32% or 35% of the votes. Cameron wants to find 3%, though he’d be happy with 2%, and would settle for 1%. It’s only that small minority Cameron really treated with contempt. They’re the target of this latest hollow trick.

As I said, revealing his growing anxiety.

Let’s just hope he’s miscalculated. And there’s no voter out there weak-minded enough to fall for a deception so transparent. 

Though, sadly, I’m afraid there might be a few.

Drowning migrants: when irritation is made to matter more than disaster

It shouldn’t be difficult to draw a line between disaster and mere irritation. And yet, oddly, there are many who seem incapable of telling them apart.

This week I listened to a young East African explaining to the BBC how he and his wife had decided to make for Europe, illegally, paying an exorbitant sum to people traffickers to take them on board a hopelessly overloaded boat from Libya. The boat capsized during the crossing; he briefly had a grip on his wife but as he found himself floundering in the water, they lost touch and she drowned.

“I didn’t know anything about how to save her,” he explained from her grave in Italy. 

Now, that’s a disaster.

Behind it lies a long history of ill-advised and badly conducted interference by Western powers, who should know better, in Africa or the Middle East. The West, having for decades tolerated or even, on occasions, positively encouraged a dictator in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, decided to do away with him in 2011. Military support to internal rebel groups led to his overthrow and eventual assassination.

The West then went home, leaving it to the Libyans to sort themselves out, which they’ve singularly failed to do. We have replaced a toxic and dangerous dictatorship by toxic and dangerous chaos. Sound familiar? It should. It’s Iraq all over again. And the same kind of chaos afflicts many other countries, with or without Western help. Somalia. Mali. Syria. Yemen.

Refugees from all those countries have been travelling to Libya, where they join the many thousands of locals also trying to get out. Why Libya? Because it’s about as close as you can get to the southern border of Europe, in Italy.

Desperate migrants attempting to cross to Europe
In grossly inadequate boats

Our possibly well-meaning, but generally ill-judged interventions have massively added to the crisis in those countries. There’s no doubt that, in that way, our nations have contributed to turning huge numbers of people into victims of people smugglers. And therefore to a great many of them drowning when their grossly inadequate boats sink.

In 2014, nearly 3500 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean. This year, in under four months, estimates are that there have been nearly 1500 deaths.

So disaster has been compounding disaster.

The Aftermath

Now for the irritation. At the end of last week, Ed Miliband, campaigning to oust David Cameron as British Prime Minister on 7 May, said that a lack of “post-conflict planning” for Libya, by the Western governments, including Britain’s, involved in the overthrow of Gadaffi, had contributed to making the crisis worse.

That annoyed Cameron and his friends in the media. “Shameful” they called Miliband’s comments. “Ill-judged.” And they preferred to focus their attention on that, rather than on the drownings. The suggestion seemed to be that the hurt to Cameron’s feelings was more important than the loss of life among the migrants.

You see? An annoyance that mattered more than a disaster.

The reality, of course, is that even the annoyance was minimal. If Cameron made such a song and dance about it, his only reason was that he saw votes in it. “Look,” he was saying, “Miliband’s being rude to me. How can you vote for a man who says such unworthy things?”

And the other bit of reality is that, if Miliband had genuinely wanted to put he boot in, he could have been far harsher still.

Back in October, the Italian government gave up on its “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean. Over the twelve months for which it ran, it saved 150,000 lives. But the Italians decided that they couldn’t afford to keep running it on their own.

The British government, headed by David Cameron for the Conservatives and his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg, was outspoken among those in the EU who blocked any move to help Italy fund search and rescue missions.

Now that certainly led to the present upsurge in deaths. And what was Cameron’s justification for indirectly contributing to the drowning of so many people? That to keep providing rescue services would only encourage more to come.

Cameron is being outflanked by anti-immigration UKIP, which has many sympathisers on the right of his own party. So to placate them he refused help to desperate, exploited migrants left to drown. For electoral reasons.

Interesting that the word “shameful” was used of Miliband’s words. When these have been Cameron’s actions.

Ed Miliband: coming good at the end. Now let's get the goal right

The last stage of a campaign is the most important, and with the British General Election three weeks away on 7 May, we’re into that last stage now. So it’s good to see that Ed Miliband is growing in stature in the final straight. “You want to exploit people’s fears rather than address them,” he told Nigel Farage of UKIP during the televised debate on Thursday, and it was heartwarming to hear him speak out so forcefully, effectively and succinctly.

The BBC Election Debate

Gone is the Miliband who seemed frankly accident prone – the worst accident coming when he simply forgot to mention the hardly insignificant matter of the economy in his speech to the final Labour conference before the election. Today, he speaks with real authority, with confidence, even with humour – he has a winsome smile and he’s making use of it these days.

This is causing consternation in the ranks of his Tory opponents. They were counting on Miliband imploding – metaphorically forgetting the economy again – and he’s stubbornly refusing to do so. They’ve tried flinging personal abuse at him and, as I pointed out before, he’s deflected their insults calmly and to powerful effect. Now, after years castigating Labour for unfunded campaign promises, they’re trying to throw money at the electorate – £8 billion more a year for the NHS being the latest wheeze – while still maintaining their commitment to savage spending cuts.

Miliband’s coming good at the end, and congratulations to him.

Sadly, however, while he’s holding off any Tory challenge, he’s not opening up any kind of commanding lead in the polls. In response, he’s adopted what is a time-honoured – or perhaps time-shaming – tactic of all politicians: trying to steal his opponents’ clothes. So he’s gone along with the austerity agenda too, if in a less draconian way. He backs the renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. And today he’s been getting tough about immigration.

It’s certainly true that no party can win an election without attracting support from outside its core. That undoubtedly means that at times it has to adopt policies that will attract people who previously voted for others. The problem arises when that means abandoning one’s own core principles.

The saddest form that problem takes is the fragmentation of one’s own side. That was strikingly illustrated at that same debate last Thursday. The Welsh Nationalists, the Scottish Nationalists and the Greens had to speak up for traditional Labour values, desperately needed today, whenever Labour fell silent on them.

Labour’s roots are in the Trade Union movement, emasculated in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher. Today, as in the US, the unions are a shadow of their old selves and, surprise, surprise, the rights of the workers they used to represent have been eroded almost to oblivion. The greatest abomination now is the zero-hour contract, which Miliband has rightly denounced. It ties an employee to a company, but without guaranteeing any work or pay. Nearly 700,000 people in Britain now have zero-hour contracts in their main employment (perhaps that should be “employment”).

That kind of phenomenon makes a return to campaigning trade unionism vital. To quote from Thursday’s debate, the problem in Britain isn’t excessive migration, it’s the deliberate undercutting of wages:

There are real issues in terms of the driving down of wages, and that has to be addressed. The way to address that is to raise the minimum wage to the living wage, and to strengthen Trade Unions. We should be looking at repealing the Trade Union legislation that Margaret Thatcher brought in, because if you have stronger Trade Unions, then you have a stronger protection of our public services and against the exploitation of workers.

Curiously, that piece of pure Labour rhetoric wasn’t pronounced by Miliband, but by Leanne Wood, leader of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru.

More generally, the problem of child poverty was one of the great political themes of the previous Labour leader (and Prime Minister), Gordon Brown. You might expect the party leadership to share the concern that “…we have experts saying that if we continue with austerity cuts, by 2020 there are going to be one million more children across the UK living in poverty…”

Sadly, it wasn’t Miliband who said that either, but the Scottish Nationalists’ Nicola Sturgeon. And yet that’s the central issue: how do we prevent millions more of our most vulnerable being sacrificed on the altar of Conservative austerity?

The most shocking moment was when Sturgeon directly called on Miliband.

Tell me tonight, is it the case that you would rather see David Cameron go back into Downing Street, than work with me?

It’s true that Miliband didn’t rule out collaboration short of a coalition, and maybe on 8 May when, as seems likely, it emerges that he will need SNP support to form a government, we’ll finally get a positive response to that question. We certainly didn’t on Thursday.

Miliband is looking increasingly prime ministerial. He’s developed an image people can respect and even like. He’s left it late but there may still be time. Now he needs to be clear about the goal: we need the Tories out of Downing Street before they wreak the kind of damage their austerity policies have promised. Again, Nicola Sturgeon got it right:

We have a chance to kick David Cameron out of Downing Street. Don’t turn your back on it. People will never forgive you.

Nor should they.