'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.

Aftermath of a rout: calling time on Corbynism?

Question: what’s worse than a politician who sacrifices political principle to attract a few more votes?

Answer: a politician who sacrifices his principles and doesn’t even get those votes.

Despite being technically leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has spent three years avoiding all leadership on Brexit, the biggest political question of his generation. He has, instead, tried to attract both sides of the debate, explaining that he wants Labour to be the party of both Leavers and Remainers. Apparently, he thinks he has only to express the wish for it to be so.

Unfortunately, and only Corbyn fans will be surprised by this discovery, attempting to please both sides of a bitter debate only puts both off.

Conservative collapse, Labour rout

Those who back Brexit have deserted Labour for the Brexit Party, which came top in last week’s elections to the European Parliament.

Those who oppose Brexit, and there are far more of them among Labour supporters, have abandoned Labour to vote for openly and actively anti-Brexit parties. Encouragingly, for those of us on the Remain side, though none of those parties individually outscored the Brexit Party, taken together they came well ahead of the total anti-EU vote, covering both that party and UKIP.

As for Labour, across the country it came third behind the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, Labour’s was not the worst performance of the night. The Conservative Party came fifth. It notched up the lowest popular vote it has had in its history, since its foundation in 1834. Both the big parties are in desperate trouble, with a mountain to climb to win back voter trust.

But, if Labour did less badly than the Conservatives, it nonetheless had a historically awful result.

The Labour Party first presented candidates in a national election in 1900. By 1910, at its fourth election, its share of the vote was struggling towards 10%. In 1920, its fifth campaign, it leaped forward to over 20%. It never fell below that level again until the European Election campaign of 2009. That was the tail end of the government led by Labour’s Gordon Brown. He was a good statesman, notably in the major steps he took towards eliminating child poverty, but he was a lousy politician, finding it hard to build empathy with voters. He achieved 15.2% of the popular vote in 2009 and was roundly, and rightly, criticised for that lamentable performance.

So it’s an extraordinary testimony to the Corbyn era that, in these most recent elections, he managed to reduce Labour’s proportion of the popular vote to an even lower level than Brown did: just 14.6%. The lowest level since 1910. It’s worse even than 1931, when Labour split after its leader, then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives. At the General Election that followed, Labour was reduced to 52 MPs, but it achieved over twice the percentage of the popular vote that Corbyn clocked up last week.

That’s not as impressive as the Conservatives, achieving their worst result in 185 years, but it’s still remarkable: Labour’s weakest performance for 119 years.

What makes this particularly ironic is that Corbyn’s supporters like to point to the increase in the popular vote Labour achieved under Corbyn in the General Election of 2017. It was the biggest increase since the end of the Second World War (though, and they sometimes seem to forget this, he didn’t actually win). His fans attribute that growth in support entirely to him.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the 2017 result. I had expected him to be crushingly defeated. Because I got it so wrong, a sense of shame kept me quiet at the time over what I believed had actually happened. Corbyn was still an unknown quantity that many felt offered them hope. He was also up against one of weakest campaigners I’ve ever seen, Theresa May, our soon to be ex-Prime Minister.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats had done themselves potentially irreparable damage by joining a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, making them complicit in much of the harm inflicted on Britain in the name of austerity. At the time, I thought it might take a generation for them to come back.

Well, last week normal service resumed. Corbyn is no longer an unknown figure. Voters have seen him and they don’t like what they see. Weak and vacillating, he no longer inspires trust or hope. The damage I expected Corbyn to inflict in 2017 he did instead in 2019. Why, he even pulled off the extraordinary feat of making the Liberal Democrats electable again, only four years after the end of their coalition with the Conservatives, not twenty as I’d expected.

After nearly nine years of austerity, with millions dependent on charity to avoid hunger, the NHS withering for lack of investment, and the most vulnerable driven to despair by benefit cuts, Britain has never needed Labour in government more. But Corbynism has almost certainly left it unelectable.

Corbyn could and should go. He’s trying to change position to back a new referendum on Brexit, but after three years of resisting the proposal, will anyone think him sincere?

A leader who has failed as he has enjoys no right to cling on. The problem, however, is that Corbynistas still have a death-grip on the party. It’s not enough to part with Corbyn, if the Corbynistas can simply impose another of their inept favourite sons on Labour. It’s not clear how we do it, but we need to prise their fingers off Labour, or give up on it altogether.

Which would force anyone looking for a progressive alternative to turn to the Liberal Democrats. The Greens might be preferable, but the Lib Dems seem closest to power. On the other hand, they’re tainted by their association with the Conservatives. Can we trust them not to play the same trick on us again?

Well, we may not have much choice. If Corbynism continues to strangle Labour, what else can we do? We might just have to take our chance on Liberal Democracy.

Interesting times ahead.

And not in a good way.

Austerity: is it really a Tory blind spot?

A joke frequently told against Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments led by Tony Blair, that he was having an extramarital affair. The object of his affections was a mystery woman known as Prudence. He simply couldn’t stop himself mentioning her whenever he spoke, so that the catchword for everything he did in dealing with the country’s finances was that it was down, he claimed, to Prudence.

“Mock on, mock on”, he might be saying today. And “what side of your face are you laughing out of now?”

After David Cameron brought the Conservatives to power, Prudence was unceremoniously dumped for a much less attractive siren known as Austerity. Far from seducing the Chancellor alone, Austerity seems to have bedded most of the senior figures of the Tory Party. Which isn’t to say they weren’t warned. Anyone at all familiar with the ideas of Maynard Keynes pointed out that there was a paradox at the core of the notion Austerity: when a government puts the brakes on spending the result isn’t necessarily a saving, but often the exact contrary. Reduced spending leads to reduced economic activity, and therefore reduced taxation, and far from emerging from indebtedness, the government merely sinks further into debt.

UK Debt as % of GDP: steadily growing under austerity
Source: BBC

Seven years on, it’s clear that this is exactly what has happened. Back in 2010, Cameron made a great deal of the supposedly unbearable cost of debt Labour had amassed, a toxic burden being passed on to the future generations. It was approaching the trillion-pound level at that time. Seven years on, it is now projected to reach £1.8 trillion by next March, but curiously the Tories have stopped talking about it.

Despite years of austerity, with constant cuts to essential public services, even the government’s deficit – the amount by which spending exceeds income – is rising again. In June, it was nearly 50% higher than it was in the same month last year. Keynes’s paradox of thrift is being verified with a vengeance: thrift cuts revenue and not just cost, so it can make things worse rather than better.

Anyone reading this piece might feel there’s nothing new in my making this claim. I’ve said it all before, haven’t I? So why am I saying it again now?

Because now we learn that the Tories are not only persisting with their austerity policies in the face of evidence that they aren’t working, but even in the face of evidence that they’re costing them votes. 

Now that’s truly odd. Because if the Tories are anything, they’re an election-winning machine, hypersensitive to any chance to win a vote, or any risk of losing one. It’s quite extraordinary that they’re sticking – for now – to a policy they know might lose them power.

Which leads to a further question. If it isn’t working financially; if it’s costing them votes politically; then why on earth are the Tories continuing to pursue austerity?

Could it really be that they are, ultimately, entirely heartless? Do they truly believe that the poor need to be punished for the offence of being, simply, poor? And the best way of punishing them is to impoverish them further?

I find it hard to believe that any but a few of the Tory leaders are quite that ruthless. Sadly, though, that leaves only one explanation: that they simply can’t see what they’re doing. Which suggests that the Parliamentary Conservative Party has simply lost all contact with reality.

Surely we wouldn’t want to suggest that Tories might be that benighted, would we?

Voting Tory – you know it makes sense. Well, some kind of sense

If you’re not voting Tory at the general election on Thursday, it’s clearly because you’re just too obtuse to understand the elementary logic that makes it the obvious choice. So, as a public service, I’m going to explain it in simple terms.

Theresa May champion of simple logic. The simplest

Let’s start with austerity.

You’ve got to understand that Gordon Brown, Labour Prime Minister, single-handed and alone, or at least alone apart from all the other Labour politicians who were his accomplices, brought about a major international financial crisis in 2008. Yes, yes, it started in the US, but it was still Brown’s fault. And the depth of his incompetence is measured by the fact that it left the country massively in debt.

You can’t have that. A huge national debt is just a burden on our kids and grandkids. It’s intolerable, immoral even, to leave them to bear it.

So we have to cut public spending. Of course we do. Because overspending only increases debt.

Less on schools, for instance. Because if we’re trying to spare our kids the crushing burden of debt, why bother them with an education?

Less on the NHS, because only sick people need healthcare, and sick people aren’t our concern.

Less on the police, because who needs policemen to protect them against, say, terrorist attacks, which hardly ever happen, or at least not more than once or twice a month? In any case, when it comes to terrorism, the trick isn’t to spend more on policing and intelligence, it’s to make some new laws. That’s so much cheaper.

Who cares if we don’t have the people to enforce the new laws? The trick with laws like that isn’t to apply them, it’s to make them. Or, more to the point, to be seen to make them, because that’s where the votes are.

Anyway, even if we do enforce them, we’ll only be chucking a few people in gaol who are obviously dangerous. Because, say, they have neighbours who can swear that they’re almost certain they once heard them say that at times they got so angry, they could understand people wanting to blow a politician up. And who cares about them? They’re like the sick – in fact, they’re really sick – and needn’t concern us any more than the other kind.

Of course, sacrifices do have to be made in the pursuit of the common good. It must be quite uncomfortable for the ten million people who are now in insecure employment – temporary or on zero-hours – but hey, that’s only one in three of the workforce. And one in three isn’t a majority, is it?

And why do we do all this? Because austerity works. It cuts debt, which was the whole aim of the exercise. Look at how dramatically seven years of Tory rule have impacted on national debt: it first went through the trillion-pound level in 2011 – and by 2017 it was a mere 1.73 trillion!

Now that’s the kind of awe-inspiring achievement that we’ve come to expect from the Tory party.

And that’s the logic behind a vote for the Tories.

Got it now?

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.

Anyone but Corbyn? Don't be silly...

It began to feel like a trend when the third person in two days referred to me as belonging to the “Anyone but Corbyn” group, neatly abbreviated as “ABC”.

It seems this is the latest term that supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, current and flailing leader of the Labour Party, have come up with in their increasingly desperate attempt to label everyone else as part of one, homogeneous and, it goes without saying, despicable group.

We were all at one time “Blairites”. It was hard to get that label to stick to people, like me, with a long track record of opposing Blair as energetically as they now oppose Corbyn.

“Red Tory” didn’t work for people who’d spent a career opposing the Tories, in some cases winning elections against them. 

The label “plotters” (because they supported the supposed “coup” against Corbyn) suggested that there was a conspiracy embracing a couple of hundred thousand people, and you have to be profoundly paranoid to believe such a plot even possible.

They still, though, seem to need a single, simplifying term to brand us all. “ABC” is the latest attempt. Sadly, though, it merely shows how hopeless it is to impose such a simplification on a phenomenon far too complex for it.

I would never go for anyone but Corbyn. Why, we could end up with someone even worse – and there are people who would make an even more dire job of leading the Labour Party than Corbyn. John McDonnell, his Shadow Chancellor, for one. If we can cast the net beyond Parliament, the devious and authoritarian leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, would be another.

Perhaps “ABTC” would work: anyone better than Corbyn. Unfortunately not. I thought Ed Miliband, the previous leader, was desperately weak. More lamentable as leader even than his own predecessor, Gordon Brown. But either of them would be an improvement over Corbyn, and the last thing I want to see is either of them back.

What about “AALBTC”, anyone a lot better than Corbyn? I’m not sure that works either. You see, Tony Blair was massively better than Corbyn (or Brown or Miliband) at winning elections; he was dismal at resisting the lure of power and therefore followed the then most powerful man in the world, Dubya Bush, into the catastrophic Iraq War. That’s Dubya who was himself the worst President of the United States, or so I imagined until I discovered Trump.

No. We need someone with the ability of Blair to win elections but the guts to say “no” to power. An earlier Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was good that way, refusing to take Britain into the Vietnam War, but he wasn’t exactly the straightest of individuals and he does suffer from the inconvenient handicap of being dead.

Harold Wilson: said no to LBJ over the disaster of Vietnam
But not exactly pure as driven snow...

So what we really need is anyone but Corbyn who’s a lot better at winning elections without being opportunistic about essential principle or kowtowing to inept political leaders. Sadly ABCWALBAWEBWBOAEPOKTIPL doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Which perhaps makes my point. We’re talking about a complex view, not susceptible to simple summary. Trying to encapsulate it with a single word or pithy abbreviation is bound to fail.

On the other hand, if you absolutely insist on coming up with a single term for those of us who oppose Corbyn within the Party, I do have one that I feel goes a long way towards filling the bill.

I like to think of myself as a Labourite.

Cameron's great reforming decade

It’s heartwarming to start 2016 with the stirring words of David Cameron ringing in my ears.

According to his New Year message, Britain is living through “one of the great reforming decades” of our history.

We’ve had great reforming eras before. Attlee’s post-War Labour government launched the National Health Service and put in place a welfare state. In the sixties, we saw Labour back under Harold Wilson and making changes that would revolutionise the way we live: doing away with the death penalty for murder, ending the legal prohibition of homosexuality, massively extending access to education. And then, in 1997, we had a Labour government which, despite the Iraq War tarnish Tony Blair gave it, notched up some remarkable achievements: the human rights act provided Britain with the closest thing to a fundamental law in its history, while the introduction of a minimum wage was matched by outstanding levels of investment in the NHS. The government took millions out of childhood poverty and brought peace to Northern Ireland.

If your preference is for the Tory version of reform, there were the Thatcher years too. We had section 28 to demonise homosexuality again, the deregulation of business that allowed unregulated banks to punish us all for their irresponsibility in the 2008 crash, and the crushing of the unions to give us today’s zero-hour contracts and non-living wages.

So what are the great reforms that Cameron has ushered in? Well, there was gay marriage, and we shouldn’t underestimate that change. On the other hand, the first breakthrough came with the introduction of civil partnerships, under a reforming Labour government, in 2004. In the next year or two, we may have a major decision to take over membership of the European Union, but that will lead either to no change at all, or to a regression to pre-1975 isolationism.

Apart from that, what have we had? Five years, now extending to six, of austerity economics. The effect has been of slowly extending hardship across the least well off in society. Less support for the working poor. Severe cuts to assistance to the ill. An onslaught against the unemployed. And, of course, the slow strangulation of the NHS as hospital after hospital goes into the red.

A monument to Cameron's achievement: homelessness growing again

These policies are intended to serve what Cameron presumably views as his big idea: the elimination of the “structural deficit” in government spending (structural deficit is a slightly easier form of deficit to cut than the actual deficit) and the reduction of public debt. However, what he described as the “legacy of debt” Gordon Brown had left to our children in 2010, had grown by well over half as much again by 2015. That’s because progress has been minimal over the deficit – it’s been pain without gain.

Indeed, in October 2015 the deficit reached its highest level since 2009, at the time of the crash.

Not much sign of a major, dramatic turn for the better there then. Nothing to compare with legalising homosexuality or even privatising the railways. Instead all we see is a general greying of society, a growing meanness as those already least comfortable in their lives are made to suffer more, while those imposing the misery retreat into their increasingly valuable houses and shut the door on what’s happening outside.

Perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to Cameron’s notion of a reforming decade. Instead we should focus on the beginning of his messages and the words, “for me, there are no new year’s resolutions, just the resolve to continue delivering what we promised in our manifesto.” That sounds much more like him, doesn’t it? For “no resolutions” read “no ideas, no commitments.” For “continue delivering what we promised” read “we’ll go on with the policies that have failed for the last half decade, and once again miss our objectives.”

A decade of reform? Sounds more like another five years of increasing squalor and low achievement. Rather like the years under Stanley Baldwin's Tory government. If you've never heard of him, or can't think of any of his achievements – well, that would be precisely my point.

Still. Happy New Year. Let’s make it one in which many more people wake up to the fact that they don’t have to put up with this kind of government for ever.

George Osborne: being buried by his own poll tax?

Tory proposals to cut tax credits, benefits to help the poorly paid survive, are “a mistake on a par with the poll tax,” according to Gordon Brown.

Brown, Labour Prime Minister until he was defeated in the 2010 General Election, tends to limit his public interventions. So it’s a measure of how important he feels the attack on tax credits is, that he’s spoken up now. And it’s telling that he compares this Tory policy to the poll tax: it was the measure that Thatcher brought in towards the end of her tenure of office, and which ultimately broke her. Unpopular in the country, it wrought consternation among her own members of parliament who saw it could cost them their seats, so they brought her down.

Gordon Brown:
elder statesman denouncing Osborne's onslaught on the poor

There are times when, as Brown suggests, it seems the tax credit cuts may do the same for George Osborne. He’s Chancellor of the Exchequer now, but has aspirations to succeed David Cameron as Prime Minister. An adverse vote by the House of Lords, which usually refrains from reversing decisions of the Commons on financial matters, forced Osborne back to the drawing board on his cuts. But now even Conservatives are questioning whether they’re acceptable, even if introduced more gradually and reduced in scope.

The Parliamentary Select Committee on Work and Pensions, despite its Tory majority, has called on Osborne to consider postponing the cuts for at least a year to consider other options, if he can’t mitigate the effects of the cuts adequately.

And a Tory MP, Stephen McPartland, boycotted a visit by a Treasury Minister and fellow Tory to his constituency this week, because the Minister refused to discuss the cuts. McPartland had calculated that a family on £20,000 a year, well below the median income for the country but well above the lowest, is likely to lose £2000 a year under the proposals. The government maintains that it’s committed to supporting strivers rather than skivers, but this would be a striving family that would suffer a major blow from Osborne’s policies.

When opposition begins to build within the Conservative Party itself, it seems that as well as a rod for backs of the poor, the Chancellor may well be building one for his own. The next election is still years away, and the Tories may weather this storm and suffer no lasting damage from it. But at least they are, for now, being put to the rack for policies which are inflicting real suffering and which they clearly hadn’t thought through.

That’s another parallel with the poll tax. It was a flat rate tax to support local government. Because it was the same for all, it disproportionately hurt the poor, as the tax credit cuts will. And Thatcher didn’t fully think it through: she had reached the point of believing so firmly in her political instincts that she insisted on pressing ahead with the measure, against the advice of most of her entourage. Until she paid the price.

We’ll see whether Osborne is able to show a little more flexibility. Or will pay the same price.

That will depend on whether he presses on with the tax credit changes. Ironically, most of us, including no doubt Gordon Brown, would be delighted to see the payments falling away to zero. Since they are earnings-related, they would wither away as people earned more. Brown would not doubt be keen to see wages rise in that way. Meanwhile, the Tories claim they want to see us becoming a high-wage, low-benefit economy. Indeed, that’s become a slightly monotonous refrain of theirs these days.

Well, raise the wages and the benefits will, automatically and inevitably, fall.

What’s interesting is that Osborne wants to cut the benefits by direct government action. In other words, he doesn’t himself believe in the “high wage” part of his mantra – if wages were rising as he claims to wish, he wouldn’t need to reduce the benefits himself. They would fall of their own accord.

All of which rather suggests he doesn’t believe his own words. In turn, that suggests that no one else should either. And, what’s more, if his proposals turn into his version of the poll tax, and come back to bury him – well, it could hardly happen to a more deserving fellow.

Unifying, dynamic, inclusive: Corbyn sets out his stall

So Jeremy Corbyn, within 48 hours of taking up the mantle of leader of the Labour Party and of the official British Opposition, has named his first shadow cabinet. And, like all such decisions, it contains the usual mix of things to excite disappointment or to excite admiration.

The biggest disappointment is that of the five top jobs, not one has gone to a woman. It’s true that two of these are determined by election not appointment – his own and his deputy’s – but the other three, Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary, were in his gift.

One of these, perhaps the greatest, the finance post of Shadow Chancellor, he’s awarded to a close ally, the man who ran his campaign for the leadership, John McDonnell. The Labour Party has recent bitter experience of a leader at loggerheads with his Chancellor: Gordon Brown was famous for working constantly to replace Tony Blair.

In the end, then, there were only two posts that he could have handed out freely. He chose men for both. It might have been pleasing to see a woman in one of them. Well, we won’t, at least for now. He has at least been generous in both those appointments: Hilary Benn, who already held the Shadow Foreign Secretary, keeps the position under Corbyn; and as Shadow Home Secretary, he’s appointed his closest rival for the leadership, Andy Burnham.

He might well have shown more of such generosity, but a great many people from other currents in the Labour Party decided they simply would not serve in a Shadow Cabinet under him. So if there has been a failure of behaviour, it hasn’t been on his part, but on theirs. 

He has described the Shadow Cabinet he appointed as “unifying, dynamic and inclusive.” Clearly, he could only be as inclusive as far as people would accept inclusion. Equally, he can only unify those who don’t set out to divide; one can only hope that the sheer scale of his victory will silence serious rebellion, at least for long enough to see whether he can prove himself, and his team, sufficiently dynamic.

As well as including people who disagree with him, he has also displayed a readiness to carry into practice as leader a willingness to compromise, that he’d increasingly exhibited during the campaign to win the position. He has for instance appointed Maria Eagle Shadow Defence Secretary – always fun to see a woman taking on so traditionally macho a brief – though she disagrees with him fundamentally on scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent (so-called: it’s so small as to make it difficult to imagine which nation it might deter) and on leaving NATO.

In passing, it’s amusing that as well as Maria Eagle he has also appointed her twin sister Anna as Shadow Business Secretary. I’m not aware of any previous Shadow Cabinet or actual Cabinet that has contained a pair of twins.

A first? Twins in the Shadow Cabinet?
One of them's Maria Eagle and the other one's Anna

Corbyn has also agreed to campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union, a position he certainly does not enthusiastically endorse. Hilary Benn, as his Shadow Foreign Secretary, confirmed that there were no circumstances in which Labour would campaign for Britain to leave the EU. That’s another significant concession.

The measure of his approach was perhaps best summed up by Chris Bryant, who takes the role Shadow Leader of the House of Commons:

It’s going to be a bumpy ride. In the conversations that I’ve already had with Jeremy, though I disagree with him on lots and lots of different things, I have to say that he has been accommodating. It’s evident there’s going to be quite a bit of give and take and when I said, ‘look I will hold my views very strongly and passionately and will put them across, sometimes too aggressively,’ he said ‘you and me both, mate.’

A refreshing attitude. Though by no means a wholly unprecedented one. The man who filled the position of President of the United States more brilliantly than any other, Abraham Lincoln, took a not dissimilar position. He appointed to his cabinet the man who most commentators, not least himself, expected to win his party’s nomination for the White House, William Seward. Indeed, for a while, Seward tried to behave as the real power in government, until Lincoln explained to him, quietly and courteously but with unshakeable firmness, that he would hold ultimate authority and not his Secretary of State.

Lincoln and Seward were both moderates on the slavery question, wanting it to wither slowly rather than to abolish it immediately. But Lincoln appointed to another senior position in his cabinet, Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase who was on the radical wing of his party.

He never used Lyndon Johnson’s colourful expression concerning FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover, “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” That was his guiding principle. And it worked: Lincoln focused on the main issue in hand, the defeat of the rebellion in the South and restoration of the Union, but by doing so, he achieved not only that objective but also the final, complete abolition of slavery through the 13th amendment to the US Constitution.

I don’t know whether Corbyn can achieve greatness as Lincoln did, and I certainly hope he doesn’t share his fate. What I can say is that by giving way on such issues as Trident and the EU, he does give his party a far better chance of focusing on the key questions; developing an alternative economic policy to austerity, and taking the battle to the Tories. While in his Shadow Cabinet appointments, he’s done everything his adversaries will allow him to do to unify the party. As for dynamism, he's already shown he has plenty of that.

Incidentally, though there are only men in the five top jobs, there are more women than men in the Shadow Cabinet as a whole.

Is Corbyn going to reconnect Labour to its roots? Is that maybe a way back to government?

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader is nothing if not exciting.

Fraught with risk, maybe, but at least more dramatic, more inspirational than a victory for any of the other candidates would have been: as a journalist told the BBC, their performance throughout the campaign has been boring to the point of robotic.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only time they became less dull was when they attempted to move as far as they dared onto Corbyn territory, picking up challenges to government they had studiously avoided until they saw the traction they were winning inside the Labour Party: back in May, for instance, Andy Burnham was trying to shake a reputation as a left winger by claiming there were aspects of the Tory benefits cuts that he could support, whereas in August he was denouncing Tory moves on sanctions against benefits claimants as “brutal.”

Corbyn, by contrast, has never seemed robotic. Indeed, he comes across as straight, shunning the usual evasions and spin of the classic New Labour injection-moulded candidate. Indeed, the calm and highly effective way he handles hostile questions from journalists was what shook my sense that he couldn’t win the media battle, and started the process of bringing me round to support for him.

It’s no wonder he can mobilise Labour: he speaks for the most profoundly held principles of the party, and he does so with a voice of unwavering commitment and honesty. The issue for crtics in the media or outside the party, however, is whether he can win that kind of enthusiasm from a broader electorate, beyond the Labour Party. He’s out of touch with voters, they claim. They also suggest he may take Labour back to the disastrous period of the eighties, when Labour found itself exiled to the wilderness of perpetual opposition.

I take a less pessimistic view. Corbyn may be taking us back to the eighties, but perhaps more the 1880s than the 1980s. That might be the most constructive move we could make, reminding us of our roots and reconnecting with our fundamental principles. The 1880s were the time time when Keir Hardie, the first occupant of the post to which Corbyn has just been elected, leader of the Labour Party, started the process that would lead it eventually into government.

Did you hear the Gordon Brown BBC tribute to Hardie? it was an excellent piece of radio which I strongly recommend. It included this tribute:

Courage, it has been said, is the greatest quality of all, because upon courage all else depends. You can be eloquent, have wisdom, work very hard but to change things, you need courage to stand up for what you believe, and Hardie never flinched from an unpopular stand.

It seems to me that this is the kind of leader Corbyn is setting out to be: not afraid of taking on the difficult questions, the positions for which some would condemn him. Hardie ran into a deep groundswell of hostility when he opposed the First World War, at a time when even workers were gripped by war fever; Corbyn’s first action after winning the leadership was to attend a demonstration in favour of refugees, at a time when a significant majority of the British population seems to favour pulling up the drawbridges against foreign immigration.

Jeremy Corbyn: the new leader immediately attends a refugee rally

Brown also said of Hardie:

For me his legacy is this: a leader whose moral outrage against what was unjust never left him, but who knew that if he was to do anything about it, he needed to create a party of government.

It seems to me that Corbyn shares that sense of outrage, as every Labour member should. Now the test is to see whether he can enthuse enough of the electorate with that same passion for a fairer society and take Labour back into government.

We’ve had an exciting moment. And there are exciting times ahead.

Faced with two options, Labour should look for a third

A great debate is getting under way inside the Labour Party, over what went wrong in the British General Election. It is boldly, unflinchingly and resolutely facing up to entirely the wrong question.

Which path to the light?
The high road? The low road? Left? Right?
Or should Labour turn around and look for something else entirely?

That question is posed in terms of whether Labour needs to go back to its winning ways under Tony Blair, as New Labour, or take a more Left-wing stance, as favoured, some suggest, by his successor Gordon Brown. The Blairite view is that Labour turned its back on people with aspirations, focusing exclusively on the poor and vulnerable.

Staunch Blairite Peter Mandelson, popularly nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness”, has bemoaned the fact that under the doomed leadership of Ed Miliband, the party was instructed to get out there with the message that “we are for the poor, we hate the rich – ignoring completely the vast swathes of the population who exist in between…”

Expressing essentially the same objection, he said that “we were sent out and told to wave our fists angrily at the nasty Tories and wait for the public to realise how much they had missed us. They weren’t missing us. They didn’t miss us.”

Mandelson isn’t entirely wrong: those fundamentally negative messages would damage Labour. But as someone who also went door to door a little for Labour, I can assure you no one told me to present that view. There will come a time when Ed Miliband, gallant loser and therefore a figure much loved by the English, will start to see the sympathy flow back towards him and I’m sure, when that happens, no one will pretend he was against aspiration.

Equally, I’m convinced that neither he nor Ed Balls who, as Shadow Chancellor (Finance spokesman), was with Miliband the main architect of Labour’s defeat and even lost his parliamentary seat as a result, were opposed to wealth creation. They wouldn’t deny the entrepreneurs responsible for it the right to become rich in the process. On the contrary, I think they saw themselves as committed to wealth creation, as the only way out of the difficulties the nation faces, and merely felt that there had to be some better regulation of just what was permitted in its name – and that the rewards people took should reflect real contribution. Huge bonuses for bankers operating their institutions at a loss ought, for instance, to be curtailed.

The Blairites are at least nominally committed to the same thing. At most, there’s probably a difference in degree between the two sides: should the top rate of tax be at 45%, 50% or 55%? Nobody’s proposing the rate of the sixties, 97.5%.

Sadly, however, the debate is going to be about backing “modernisers” (read Blairites) or “old Labour” (read those closer to Miliband). Whereas it should, in fact, be about entirely other matters.

It’s true that Tory economic policy is inequitable: the richest have doubled their wealth over the the last ten years, despite the crash, while those least able to bear it are suffering devastating hardship. But the real issue is that it doesn’t even work. Growth is stuttering. The debt is up, not down. The pain of constant cuts in government spending isn’t being rewarded by gain in economic recovery.

The answer isn’t simply to call the Tories nasty or hate the rich. It’s to offer an alternative to the constant cuts. We’ve known since Keynes that austerity doesn’t work. And yet Labour’s answer has been simply to offer the same with some mitigation of its worst effects.

We should be arguing for an alternative to austerity. We need to communicate the message that there’s no better time to borrow that when interest rates are just about zero. If the funds go into stimulating the economy, more people will find real jobs. They’ll pay more taxes, and they’ll buy more goods. A virtuous cycle will be kicked off, where the economy starts to fix itself, and the need for further government borrowing goes down as tax revenues go up. Without soaking the rich – simply by the sheer organic effect of relaunching the economy.

But what that means is denying the premisses of the Tory argument. It means saying “the problem isn’t about how much austerity we should have, or where it should be targeted, it’s about dropping the policy altogether.”

Sadly, it’s the SNP in Scotland, the true victors of the General Election, who pursued that line, and not Labour, who lost.

If you haven’t already seen the election night exchange between famously aggressive presenter Jeremy Paxman, and the former SNP leader Alex Salmond, then you should watch it now. It’s a master class in refusing to accept the premises of a hostile argument. Without being evasive, you just answer “no” and keep saying it as long as you need to. Which makes the clip also a great illustration of how to deal with hostile media, about which Labour also constantly complains – though with a predominantly right-wing press, Labour ought to be used to it by now, and have learned to see it off as Salmond did.

When Salmond ran rings round Paxman
A master class in handling hostile media and fighting the right battle

Paxman asked what lay behind the SNP success and, when Salmond answered that it was Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, tried to needle him.

“You’re a very modest man, aren’t you?” 

Salmond, unfazed, replied “modesty becomes me, yeah.”

Later, Paxman tried to get Salmond to deny the SNP’s earlier refusal ever to work with the Tories.

“Is there any possibility of any sort of deal between you and David Cameron if the Tories are just a little bit short of an overall majority?” he asked.

“No.” 

“None whatsoever?”

“Correct.” 

“If David Cameron offered you full fiscal autonomy, in other words control over taxes in Scotland, you’d still say no?”

“He won’t.”

“You’re guessing.”

“No, I’m not.”

Perhaps the most telling exchange came in the middle of the interview.

“I suppose you could take some of the credit for the Tory triumph in England, couldn’t you?” asked Paxman.

The reference was to the campaign whipped up by the Tories and their friends in the press about the possible election of a minority Labour government, dependent on SNP support. The SNP was presented as a bogey man, and Miliband only contributed to the damage by constantly denying he’d ever work with the SNP – in other words, he played into the lie that the SNP was dangerous.

Salmond stayed calm and told Paxman:

“No, I think Ed Miliband should take the credit for the Tory triumph in England. I think he should have fought a totally different sort of campaign. If he’d fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.”

Now there’s the key issue for Labour. Not should we be more like Blair, or more like Brown. Instead, can we find a leader who doesn’t fall into the other side’s trap but fights the campaign we need and gets us elected?

In other words, can we find our own Nicola Sturgeon?

The great debate debate

Two months out from the UK general election, and one question seems to be dominating the headlines.

We are nearing the end of five years of a government that has pursued austerity policies which were promoted as the way to reduce national debt, though they haven’t. What they have done, on the other hand, is increase poverty, with multifold growth in dependency on food banks in this First-World nation, and growing numbers of vulnerable people being driven to despair and sometimes suicide by denial of any kind of support.

At the same time, those policies have entrenched the mindset that views the wealthiest as the most valuable, the most admirable, the most entitled to protection.

And against that background, what are we debating? Why, debates.

The Prime Ministerial variety. The idea is that anyone with a chance of winning the premiership, or even anyone leading a parliamentary party however remote the likelihood of their getting to Downing Street, should be lined up on TV to bang away at each other about what they or their Party bring to the party.

Most people find these events colossally dull. It’s not at all clear that they have any effect on the outcome of the election. Last time round, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, seemed to gain most support from the debates, but he ended up losing five MPs at the election.

David Cameron clearly wants no debates. His opponents are accusing him of cowardice, of running scared.

Frankly, I think they’re wrong. I believe his advisers have spotted what a lot more voters should have seen: the man is profoundly lazy and hates having to master a brief. That’s why he frequently gives the impression that he makes up policy on the hoof, without thinking through the consequences. For instance, he slashed spending on flood defences on assuming office, by nearly 20%. Then there was serious widespread flooding in 2013, and he had to dig up some emergency funding, so as not to look heartless.

Last time round: David Cameron, left, with Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown
This time he's too idle. And, amazingly, it seems to be working for him

Note that “look” is the key word there: being heartless is fine for this self-declared Christian Prime Minister, but he doesn’t want to look it.

Interestingly, by coming up with funds which went some of the way towards replacing those he’d cut, he won plaudits and was seen as statesmanlike. Instead of being perceived as inept in the first place, and slow to fix his error.

And all that explains why he doesn’t want to debate. It doesn’t matter how incompetent his actions are, he can still emerge from the mess looking good. Which is partly a reflection on the way of thinking of far too many voters, and partly a measure of the effectiveness of the opposition to him.

In those circumstances, why would his advisers inflict all the trouble of debate prep on a man as disinclined as he is to hard work? When he doesn’t seem to need it?

So instead he’s found excuse after excuse for not having the debates. He wouldn’t take part unless the Greens were invited, as though he cared about the Greens, a party far more firmly of the left than the official Labour opposition. When the Greens were included, he then insisted that the Democratic Unionist Party from Ulster should be invited too. Now he’s saying he would only do one debate at most.

What’s happened? The press and the opposition have walked straight into the trap. They’re all raving about whether there should be debates, whether Cameron should take part, whether they should take place without him if he refuses to turn up.

So we obsess about a process issue. While people out there are being exposed to real and unbearable suffering – truly unbearable in some cases, as people die of it. And the proportion of the electorate that is apathetic about the whole business of politics continues to grow, regarding it as essentially irrelevant to their lives.

Which, if the great debate on debates is all politicians can offer, it certainly is.

A monument to Gordon Brown now failed and empty

It moved me more than I expected to hear that the Strathmore Hotel was closing.

Luton, where I now live, isn’t a town that’s particularly strong on prestige. The Strathmore, right in the centre of town, was probably about the closest we got to it.

Not that it was particularly good, or anything: it was housed in a multi-storey concrete slab and the one time I stayed there, my room could only be regarded as luxurious in contrast to a broom cupboard. It was also long on the threadbare, and a bit short on the clean.

The Strathmore.
No great shakes but about as close to prestige as Luton gets

But it was the place that I went to hear a star of the Labour Party speak, way back in 1994. 

John Smith, leader of the Party, had suddenly died a few months earlier. His death opened the way to a hard fought leadership contest. On the one hand stood the heavyweight Gordon Brown, who’d been close to John Smith. Indeed, as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking on financial matters for the Opposition, he was second only to the leader in stature and his most obvious heir.

On the other hand stood a newcomer, brilliant and charismatic, but without Brown’s standing. Tony Blair, Shadow Home Secretary, had come up with a memorable slogan: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ It promoted the belief that people weren’t necessarily born criminals, but often became criminals in response to the misery of their surroundings.

But Blair was a bit of an unknown quantity. What did he really represent? Was he just a bit of a crowd-pleaser? On the other hand, after 18 years in opposition, was that just what Labour needed?

Brown came to speak at the Strathmore Hotel in Luton during his leadership campaign. As a rank and file member of the Labour Party, I went to hear him. I was a little sceptical, seeing him as a man of the Party apparatus, a little soulless, over-ambitious, too cold and calculating for my liking.

At the meeting, though, he astounded me. He spoke with eloquence and feeling about the under-privileged, and he made a commitment that if Labour were elected under his leadership, he would make it his primary task to reduce or even eliminate child poverty in this country.

I left the meeting wholly won over. He had my vote. Blair was just a photogenic face and a soundbite. Brown was the real thing.

What happened a few weeks later? The mythology has been immortalised in Stephen Frears’ beautifully crafted TV film The Deal, starring the versatile Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. According to this version of events, broadly accepted as true, Brown and Blair made an agreement at the Granita restaurant in Islington, North London: Brown would stand down from the leadership campaign to give Blair a clear run. In return, Blair would make him Chancellor of the Exchequer if Labour won office at the forthcoming general election.

Blair may also have promised to resign from the top job some point in the future to let Brown have a go.

In May 1997, Blair formed his first government. Brown was Chancellor. But almost from the start, Brown was positioning himself to force Blair out so he could take over. The bad blood between number 10 Downing Street, residence of the Prime Minister, and number 11, residence of the Chancellor, became legendary.

It was one of the defining characteristics of the governments Blair led. And eventually, in 2007, after a little over ten years, Blair did stand down. Brown had a honeymoon bounce in the polls and could have gone to the country in the autumn, when he might have won. But he bottled out and went through to May 2010, when he was soundly beaten.

That deal in Islington set a time bomb ticking which eventually wrecked the Labour government and sank Brown. The story has many of the elements of Greek tragedy: a catastrophe set in train by its very victims, and which once started could not be halted – indeed was driven forward by their strivings.

And yet Brown, as Chancellor and Prime Minister, was a leading figure in administrations that took a million children out of poverty. He didn’t achieve his ambition of lifting them all, but he did far more than anyone else had for decades. His successors have been throwing kids right back into heart-wrenching misery: 300,000 in the first two years alone.

Blair, on the other hand, proved himself as tough on crime as any Tory Prime Minister, as indifferent to its causes.

What Brown did for poor children is monument enough to his achievement, and should compensate for much of the other bitterness. Each time I saw the Strathmore, I thought of it, and remembered the day I witnessed him pledging himself to that endeavour.

Now, though, the Strathmore itself has failed. The place where I listened to Brown and was won over stands empty and forlorn. Grandeur has evaporated.

Leaving only a sense of pathos at past hopes partly fulfilled.