I have always secretly wished that the singer Gareth Gates would get involved in politics and become Housing Minister. That way, there is a possibility (admittedly a small one) that he could get embroiled in a dodgy deal to supply Council house gates nationwide with a company owned by a man called Gareth. The resultant scandal would have to be called Gareth Gates Gareth’s Gates Gate, and that would amuse me greatly.

Sadly, it’s not happened yet. What we have instead is Cable-gate, the odd scandal which has erupted in the wake of a Lib Dem being recorded disagreeing with some of the ideas of another political party. Cable-gate (Dec 22), by the way, is not to be confused with Cable-gate (Early Dec), which was about diplomatic leaks. All very confusing…

Anyway, the furore over what Cable said and whether he should have said it has been covered elsewhere, as has the fall-out from other ministers doing the same thing, so I won’t go into it much here. Cable obviously prejudiced his BSkyB decision by giving comments which were then made public. But the conduct of the journalists in exposing bits of what he said in a supposedly private conversation was incredibly cynical and no good for democracy.  This is a particularly good article on the wider situation and what it says about the coalition, I think.

The article makes some very good points about Labour’s reaction, and particularly Ed Miliband’s calls for Cable to resign, which I think were shrill opportunism and symptomatic of the short-term, muddled thinking Labour are riddled with right now in terms of their criticism of the government.

I have some Labour-leaning friends, ranging in views from the casual by-stander to the active elected official, and they all seem jubilant at the prospect of Vince’s downfall. “The end of the coalition is nigh,” they’d trumpet, if they spoke like Victorians. They are gleeful. Miliband seemed to be the same, with his immediate call for swift action against Cable and saying that the coalition is a “sham.”

All of that makes me wonder what Labour actually want. Is it an end to cuts? It can’t be, because they themselves promised massive cuts. Is it to do with tuition fees? If it is, they’ve not told us what they’d do yet…

Is it the end of the coalition? If so, I don’t understand their thinking, because there would be a general election which the polls suggest they’d certainly not win outright. There’d probably be another coalition. Then what? A Tory/LD one again? A Labour/LD one? Then they’d have to compromise in the very way they’re publicly criticising now.

I have no idea what Labour want. All I know is what they don’t want – the coalition.

There’s been a linguistic shift from Labour this week, after Miliband ordered his ministers to stop talking about the “ConDems” and start talking about the “Conservative-led coalition.” This may well do us Lib Dems a favour, and it’s certainly a small step towards recognising the reality of a coalition that is, numbers-wise, 5/6ths blue and 1/6th yellow. But Miliband has shown that he still doesn’t “get” coalition politics by vainly trying to bring the whole thing crashing down when there’s dissent, as with Cable. Does he not understand that a coalition is two separate parties working together for the good of the country?

Miliband’s position is contradictory and hypocritical. He’s been criticising the Lib Dems for cosying up to the Tories too much. Now he criticises when there’s clear distance between the parties. And he says that a government can’t function when it’s split despite being a key part of a hugely divided Labour cabinet himself until earlier this year.

Coalition’s are difficult. Single party government is difficult. There’s no way on earth that hundreds of MPs will all think the same way even if they’re in the same party. Surely everyone with any sense can see that? So why can’t Miliband? Unless he’s lying of course… And why can’t he come up with a sensible set of alternatives to the coalition he so clearly dislikes for a different reason every day?

Maybe it’s because he just wants to beat the coalition to get some power. The very thing he and his supporters are most critical of the Lib Dems for.

Rick

I hope everyone is coping well in the snow. Once again it’s making driving and walking difficult. I actually think the Council are doing as good a job as they’re able in keeping the main roads gritted, but if your grit bin needs filling or they’ve missed main roads then let me know as that needs sorting.

Last night I foolishly decided to spend the evening outdoors, at the football, watching Manchester City play a team from Austria. My worries that their familiarity with snowy conditions would help them came to nothing. At one point I actually stopped getting colder and briefly began to feel a warm glow. I worried that this was actually me dying, and I was relieved when normality and numbness was restored.

It’s going to be colder tonight than at any other time, so the weather forecast predicts, so make sure you’re keeping warm and please check up on any friends or neighbours who might be struggling with the cold. If I can help in any way, please let me know.

Rick

I am nearly in my thirties now, and so expect very soon to be engulfed in the type of general bewilderment that I can feel growing within me daily.

One such contributory factor to my general slack-jawed wonder at the mysteries of the modern world is the Phil Woolas saga, which has in the last 24 hours made me question whether or not I have gone truly mad.

As I understood it, a couple of weeks ago Mr Woolas, the Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was found by an election court to have deliberately and knowingly lied about his Lib Dem opponent at the General Election. As a result, the election in that constituency was declared invalid.

Soon afterwards, Harriet Harman publicly disowned Mr Woolas on behalf of the Parliamentary Labour party. I understand her sentiment, but I suspect she over-reached her own authority somewhat, and unsurprisingly there was a bit of a revolt within the Labour party over what I assumed was an issue of process, i.e. Harman hasn’t got the power to get rid of people she no longer likes, no matter how serious their crimes, so she shouldn’t have done that.

Now though, it seems that Labour’s support of Woolas goes way beyond that. They seem to be suggesting that he is the victim of a grave misjustice and that his actions aren’t so serious after all!

Yesterday on the Politics Show in the North West, Graham Stringer MP said that he supported Woolas (and had given money to his campaign to challenge the courts’ ruling) because Woolas didn’t agree with the verdict of the court. And today, Woolas has announced that he’s been “humbled” by supporters who’ve raised £30k to fund his judicial review claim. These supporters include many MPs, the Blairs, and party members.

Has the world gone mad? Here is an MP found by a court of law to have lied, knowingly, and people are supporting him?! He told a lie, knowing it was a lie, with the specific intention of getting votes, and this is now somehow OK?! Woolas may well not agree with the verdict of the court (and he is entitled to appeal against it), but I suspect most people convicted of offences in court have a problem with the verdict. It doesn’t make them innocent.

What have I missed here? Fair enough Woolas shouldn’t have been summarily put out to dry by Labour, but they should have put into place whatever procedures exist for people found guilty of such things and then put him out to dry. He knowingly lied about his opponents to win votes!

Stringer tried to draw parallels between Woolas and the Lib Dem tuition fee issue. Don’t get me wrong, any party departing from a manifesto pledge has some explaining to do, as we definitely have on fees (an issue on which, as I’ve said many times, I think we’re now wrong). But the two issues are miles apart for so many reasons I don’t know where to begin. This wasn’t a policy promise made and then changed later when the necessities of government meant making sacrifices. This wasn’t a manifesto commitment dropped when reality trumped ambition. This wasn’t even a half-true, unbalanced, biased and jaundiced take on something, like most political leaflets of all colours tend to be.

This was a series of blatant, out and out lies told by someone who knew they were lies when he told them, but told them anyway, because the election was on a knife-edge and he wanted to win it. How can anyone be supporting this man?

No politician or political party can claim to be perfect. There are manifesto pledges of every colour strewn on the ground through the years like confetti. But when someone sits down to write an election leaflet, consciously writes things in it that he knows to be lies, and then those lies swing that election by misleading the public into thinking them true, that’s no way to act. And yet Labour MPs are lining up to say that it’s fine.

Seriously, I’m asking. Has the world gone mad?

Rick

I find it odd that the papers are as angry as they are this morning in revealing that the Lib Dems considered dropping the tuition fee pledge as part of coalition negotiations prior to the elections.

The media coverage suggests that this was some kind of conspiracy to wilfully mislead voters, but this is evidently not true, and anyone thinking for a second about how coalition politics works should be able to see that.

The allegations centre on internal party documents compiled in the spring talking about post-election tactics in the event of a hung parliament. Some of these documents advocate areas of policy where compromise might be acceptable. Tuition fees is one such area.

This is being spun in the media today as evidence of some kind of conspiracy, and of secret agreement to abandon promises. It really isn’t anything of the sort, and I actually think that it was quite sensible of the Lib Dems to have begun to consider negotiating positions given that a hung parliament was looking likely. Remember that three days after the election these same newspapers were screaming at the Lib Dems to reach an agreement. Imagine how long it would’ve taken had they not have thought about compromise in advance.

This isn’t evidence of half-heartedness on manifesto commitments. It’s evidence of electoral realities. There’s no evidence to suggest that if we’d have won the election outright we’d have compromised on any of this. Of course I’d prefer for us to compromise on nothing ever. However, since we came third and the Conservatives won, this would’ve been obviously undemocratic and unacceptable. I see nothing wrong with having compromised, and planned for those compromises in advance,  given the likely election result. I would be amazed if similar discussions didn’t take place in the other two major parties. I’m surprised that people are shocked by the news today.

No lies were told, nobody was misled. We campaigned for policies we fully believed in, and I hope we’d have implemented them fully had we won. But we didn’t win. We came third by miles, form 1/6th of a coalition and thus had to make massive compromises in key areas so that we could make some small things happen. We could’ve made no compromises and formed no part of a coalition, but then we wouldn’t have had the chance to implement anything, the country would’ve been unstable, there’d have been another election, and who knows what would have happened then?

Unfortunately of course this is another PR disaster for us today, and it’s a difficult one to defend because it looks much worse than a detailed explanation entirely unsuitable to a 30 second news report would make better. But I think the issue reveals two problems with the system which are worse than anything Clegg etc have done.

The first is internal to our party. Whilst I applaud the pre-election planning, it was done in secret and with no consultation with members. Some topics the leadership thought worthy of compromise aren’t ones I do (like tuition fees), and I don’t like that in a supposedly democratic party the opportunity to negotiate away policy areas rests with a secret panel of just a few. I’m not sure there’s a way out of this in place at the moment, because obviously such pre-election discussions need to take place privately so that parties can come to a united view, but perhaps in future members could be involved earlier in prioritising policies to avoid some of the headaches we find ourselves in today.

The second problem that this issue reveals is with our electoral system. In countries where coalitions are the norm, this type of deal-making is accepted. I don’t have a problem with it myself. If no party wins overall control, then parties need to work together. Small parties (like us) have to give more ground than big parties (like the Tories) and for good democratic reasons which I hope people understand. Of course such compromises are disappointing, but so is life sometimes! And such compromises need to be planned and negotiated. The type of behaviour splashed across the front pages today is the norm in other countries, and people don’t seem to mind there. Unfortunately here we have virtually no modern history of coalitions, so no need previously for these negotiations. Instead of two parties working together and each giving away bits of their manifesto, we have had single parties working alone and just dropping bits of their own when the reality of government hits.

Pre-election the polls consistently said that it was likely there’d be a coalition and that not enough people wanted single-party rule. Now we have what people voted for, and there is anger at its mucky realities.

For me, this anger is another argument for electoral reform. Under our current system we expect single party rule. The way we vote is set up to encourage it, asking to vote for a single candidate and having us normally use this vote to vote for a single party to send a single person to Westminster regardless of how close the result was or how many people voted for others. That’s not a sophisticated way to vote on a set of complex issues, but the flip side is that we are supposed to get stable, single party rule.  But it’s not been delivered this time and, given the great divisions on domestic policy we’re seeing at the moment across many parties it might not next time either. So we get the unsophisticated voting system coupled with the messiness of coalitions.

We should have one or the other. I prefer a better voting system and coalitions. I think such a change would lead to more mature, less extreme government based on compromise, and much more of a reflection of the voting intentions of society. Yes there’d be things we’d like which we couldn’t have, but that’s just like real life. At least there’d be more openness from the start about what was up for grabs, and an expectation of compromise rather than the disappointment of surprise policy changes.

Of course I’d love a Lib Dem majority government, but under FPTP that can occur with 40% of the vote or less. It did for Labour for years. That’s not very democratic. But if we are to have coalitions we need a voting system which gives people more of a say. AV does that slightly (more than one preference can be expressed), and systems like STV (much more proportionately reflecting actual votes) do it lots. If we had electoral reform, coalitions would become more normal, compromise would too, and the perfectly normal and understandable behaviour of Clegg and co would not be front page news.

Rick

The students protesting in London today have my support (apart from the ones burning and smashing things, who should calm down). We shouldn’t be asking them to pay up to three times the tuition fees they currently do. It’s no wonder they’re angry, and I share their anger.

As Lib Dems we offered them hope of an alternative in our manifesto, and if we vote to raise fees we’ve not only taken that alternative away but broken a promise which might take a long time to make good.

The government’s proposals are wrong, in my view. They are especially wrong for Lib Dems who campaigned against this. I am pleased to see that at the grass roots in the party there is a growing body of people publicly voicing opposition to the government’s plans.

Nick Clegg’s assertions that they’re “progressive” might be true (who knows what “progressive” even means really?) but this misses two massive points. First, that some complex formula about progressiveness won’t out-do the looming spectre of massive debt for poor students. And second, that the government’s policy is the direct opposite of our election promise.

Labour are seeking to make gains from all of this, as well they might. There was an angry exchange in Parliament today between Clegg and Harriet Harman. But the politics of the fees debate are different to the issue and to its potential resolution. Students shouldn’t be fooled by Harman and others into thinking that Labour offer them something different. The truth is that they don’t. They have form in betraying students, and they offer nothing new now.

Remember, Labour were against fees in 1997 only to introduce them having been elected. They then explicitly promised not to introduce top-up fees in their election manifesto in 2001, only to do just that in 2003. Prior to leaving office it was Labour which commissioned the Browne review which recently recommended the latest big fee increase. And today, although Labour oppose the coalition’s policy, their own luke-warm support for a graduate tax is neither costed nor workable. They have no alternative policy. They have no funding plan for higher education, no idea what to prioritise and what to cut, and nothing to offer students except a despatch box to moan from.

The students are rightly angry at the government. But they shouldn’t think that Labour offer them a better way. Right now, no party does, which makes any Lib Dem supoort for the Browne review all the more depressing to me.

Rick

It is ironic that today’s Phil Woolas judgement, which should have humbled some politicians into thinking twice before getting carried away with hyperbole, was immediately greeted by Baroness Warsi as evidence of Ed Miliband’s “terrible misjudgement” and of “despicable” behaviour by Mr Woolas himself.

Whilst I agree that Mr Woolas has brought politics into even more disrepute than it splatters around in normally, and that it was probably not wise of Mr Miliband to appoint as a shadow minister somebody in the midst of court proceedings, such wild language from Baroness Warsi is typical of the handles politicians so regularly fly off. I wouldn’t use that kind of language in the office, because it’s no way to work. So why is it OK for politicians to do it? We should all put the angry pills back in the box for a bit.

I hope that today’s judgement is a defining moment, as Simon Hughes suggests that it might be. But Mr Hughes’ and my party can be just as guilty of borderline-slanderous leaflets and public statements as anyone else, and some of us are no better than some Labour or Tory politicians when it comes to behaving like children and splattering campaigns with half-truths and worse. If it’s a defining moment, maybe the Prime Minister and Nick Clegg can stop blaming Labour entirely for the debt and deficit (when the reality is that the former government, if they can shoulder any blame at all, do so as one of lots of contributory factors) and maybe Labour can stop using phrases like “social cleansing”. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Today’s not the time for party-political points scoring. Yes, the man in the dock was a Labour politician, but it could easily have been someone from another party. Baroness Warsi talks about “shocking misjudgement” in Miliband appointing Woolas, but the same charge could quite easily be levelled at one or two Tory appointments of late, and could just as robustly be defended. Maybe we’d all be better off if we talked in softer tones?

But we seem stuck in a rut on this. Our adversarial political system with its secretive party plottings and tribal battles has meant that, for a lot of good people, hatred of the opposition ends up trumping anything else. I know people from all sides who take more pleasure in seeing their opponents fail then in anything else. Some of the comments on here sometimes are from just that type of person, I suspect.

It leads to negative campaigning, beating the opposition at any cost, and winning mainly because that’s the only way the other side loses. It’s no way to behave, and hopefully today is a step to stopping that. It’s playground stuff.

It’s so odd how these things develop – how positive relationships turn sour over silly things, and then get bitter and nasty and lead to all sorts of lies being slung between people who actually want pretty similar things and have all given up their time for the public good. One small difference of opinion is blown out of proportion in the heat of debate or in the cold space of a newspaper letters page, and because compromise might mean losing an election, the only thing to do is to raise the stakes. Claims become more outlandish, difference become more accentuated, people diverge and then lies get told. Voters get misled, elections get warped, relationships never recover.

We all need to tone it down. It’s hard I know. There are degrees of truth too. One man’s truth might be another man’s half-story. One person’s reasonable leaflet may be another man’s pack of lies. Maybe I’m as guilty of that as the next person, it’s hard to be objective in the middle of it.

What I do know is that people don’t like politicians because they think we’re all liars. Some perhaps genuinely are. But most aren’t. So why do we lie? It’s because appearing the smallest bit weak or unsure is a gift that the opposition will exploit devastatingly, even though in reality it’s perfectly natural. Every mis-spoken word or mistake can haunt a politician forever. It means we have to say things we might not mean, and make promises we can’t keep. And to get out of the accusation of lying we have to accuse the opposition of even bigger lies. And then they have to accuse us of bigger ones still, until we’re all screeching liars who just lie and screech about the other side lying and screeching.

If there’s a by-election in Oldham, God knows what the result will be. Maybe the post-coalition polling numbers mean we’ll lose it. maybe the post-Woolas backlash means we’ll win it. Maybe because it’s a by-election it’ll be an odd result nobody can predict. One thing I hope it is is a clean fight, focusing on party differences and the qualities of the candidates.

But right now I have to write a letter to the local paper rebutting someone who’s told a lie about me. Again. Roll on that defining moment!

Rick

I appreciate that the national press, influential think-tanks and the country’s leaders have given their views on the Comprehensive Spending Review, but I also know that the world is waiting with baited breath for the thoughts of a back-bench opposition Councillor from a quiet northern town.

So here goes. Tin hat on.

I think that there are some hugely disappointing elements to the CSR. It was a sad day, no matter what anyone thinks about how necessary it was. The whoops from the government benches did nobody any credit.

I don’t think it’s all bad. Nick Clegg is certainly overdoing it when he says that there are Lib Dem things running through it like a stick of rock, but there are certainly some good Lib Dem things, and probably more than our 1/6^th share of the coalition merits.

The “fairness premium” is good news, despite its silly name. The £1 billion regional growth fund is good. The Green Investment Bank is too small, but it exists and has £2 billion for low-carbon technology and new jobs in it. Friends of the Earth said that the government is “finally getting it.”

Local government will get lots of freedoms (even though most of them will be freedoms to cut, in the short term), although someone needs to tell Eric Pickles that a mandatory freeze on Council Tax isn’t one of them. He thinks it is.

The top 10% will pay more as a result of the CSR than any other group. The government has made good progress on child benefit, capital gains and tax evasion and avoidance. I don’t think that’s a bad return from 59 Lib Dem MPs up against more than 300 Tories, most of whom would abolish inheritance tax and some of whom I suspect would hunt the poor with dogs.

But the negatives outweighed the positives, as they always would have done, no matter who was running the show and no matter what way they’d chosen to try and bring down the deficit.

The bank levy isn’t nearly high enough. Combined with the Corporation Tax break some banks may actually end up better off. That’s blatantly not right and should’ve been improved.

Some of the welfare cuts which may make sense strategically will undoubtedly lead to individual cases of true hardship in reality for people who suffer through no fault of their own. I honestly don’t know if that’s ever really avoidable.

It annoys me that the government claims “progressivity” despite it surely being obvious to anyone that a series of public service cuts is bound to be regressive. The regression would be a bit less bad were it not for the pretence that it’s something else. The biggest users of public services are the least well off, so any cut to those services is sure to hurt them more. Why anyone is surprised that the CSR is regressive surprises me. Why the government consistently claims that it’s progressive surprises me more. If it won’t put taxes up, what else was it ever going to be?

I was also disappointed that the Labour opposition was quite weak. There’s clearly room for criticism, but there was a lot of hyperbole which didn’t stack up for me. A lot of Trade Union and pressure group feedback got more coverage than the official Labour response, which I suspect would’ve been more rounded and nuanced, and less shouty. That’s a shame for the country if not the government (and Lib Dem councillors facing election in May like me), because we need a powerful alternative voice. I don’t think Miliband and Johnson have that yet.

Talk of some kind of “ideologically-driven” retrenchment seemed a bit rich. For one thing, the government will be spending more than £700bn on public services – the same as in 2006. And also, screaming for the opposite of cuts is “ideologically driven” too. Ideologically driving things is only bad if you disagree with the ideology concerned.

As ever, I thought the debate was far too polarised. Osborne too sure of himself, Labour too sure of Osborne’s inate desire to ruin the country. Neither are anywhere near right. Let’s remember that Labour’s plans were for a rough 20% cut in each department, and some tax rises. Neither the cuts nor the taxes were spelled out, but anyone who thinks that a CSR delivered by Ed Miliband yesterday would’ve been all champagne and roses is very wrong. It would’ve hurt, but in a different way.

Bury, like other councils, will see big cuts when its budget is made in February. I am already dreading that night because no matter what happens that Council will be doing less the next day that it did the day before, probably with less staff. No matter what your ideology, people losing their jobs and losing the services they enjoy isn’t pleasant.

We need to work together to get through it now, and I hope that we can do so in a constructive way to make the best of this bad situation. Rick 

It’s rained more or less non-stop for the last 24 hours, in a reflection of the nation’s mood so unsubtle that it’s the meteorological equivalent of a brick through a window. Today’s Comprehensive Spending Review will be a bleak day indeed for lots and lots of people, and it makes me so sad to think that many people are going to be worse off in so many ways tonight than they were this morning.

Debates have raged for months about the timing, scale, and alternatives to the cuts announced today. They’ll continue to rage. Nobody knows for sure who’s right. That my party has so obviously changed its tune makes its position all the more difficult to defend, but to me it displays the genuine uncertainty of this whole debate. Nobody knows, and neither view is necessarily right or wrong. Both sides have queues of economists lined up to back them.

The cuts might work, or they might not. They might make all the difference, in either direction, or no difference at all. Perhaps in this whole sorry mess the one thing that’s made me saddest of all is that I’ve learned that there are no easy answers and that there’s nobody who knows for sure.

The opposition aren’t in a place to offer an alternative at the moment. What they have is vague and half-formed. It’s little more than something fuzzily more palatable than the cuts. It isn’t a yet a plan that could work. When pressed on taxes other than those for banks, it runs dry. When asked for specific cuts, there’s no answer.

So we have only the coalition’s plans. Some have been leaked or released already, and many won’t become known for a while whilst the figures are worked out and digested. But the bulk will become clear today. The effects, on the economy and on society, probably won’t be known for months or years. Some I agree with, some I don’t. Some that I hear today will seem sensible, others will make me want to cry. Many I won’t understand, and for some my first impression will be wide of the mark and I’ll change my mind.

I’ll probably be right on some and wrong on others, and so will the government. I only hope they’re more right than wrong, because this is all we’ve got.

From the moment the Chancellor sits down after the CSR both sides will be claiming that their way is the only way and that the other way spells doom. Neither can be totally right.

Every interest group and pressure group will be giving their views. All will speak for their corner, none for society as a whole, and nobody can be sure they’re right either. It’s their job to stand up for their cause, but any special interest group bemoaning a cut to its budget needs to be challenged to identify another way, otherwise they contribute little to the debate except a head in the sand.

It’ll be a bad day today. I only hope that the cuts are announced and opposed with the humility the situation merits, and that politicians on all sides put points-scoring second to acknowledging that for lots of people life will be harder from now on, as it was always going to be.

There should be no triumphalism from the coalition today, nor should there be smug superiority from the opposition. We need to rally round a cause, whether that be accepting the coalition cuts and supporting the vulnerable affected by them, or opposing them and finding a better alternative. We can’t keep screaming at each other.

A battle will rage over the fairness of the cuts, I’m sure. But the truth is surely that it’s not the cuts that can be fair but the outcome of those cuts in a few years time. Examining a cut for fairness today, as politicians and think tanks will doubtless do, can only ever be premature. Nobody will be able to make a real call on the fairness of cuts until they’ve seen the whole show play out.

And although a fairer society is the goal, no specific cut to reach that goal can ever be truly fair. Even the richest don’t deserve to lose a handout they’ve been entitled to until now, if they lose it for reasons beyond their control. There might be some cuts fairer for society than others, but when people and families lose out themselves, illusions of fairness come crashing down. No tax rise is fair either. Asking even the wealthiest to pay more and get the same is not fair on them.

Anyone claiming that personal heartache for blameless people is acceptable as the price for a fairer society, as the coalition might do, is wrong. Conversely, anyone claiming that fewer cuts and higher taxes would mean a fairer society with no personal heartbreak for anyone now or in the future, as Labour might do, is equally wrong.

Everyone needs to acknowledge that any solution would be far from perfect. It’s honest to say that you think your solution is a bit better than the alternative, or to press for the bits you think will work and trash the bits you think are rubbish, but going much further than that seems untruthful today. There isn’t a magic set of answers that will definitely work, because if there was there’d be no disagreement. Cuts are only less painful if you think we need a short, sharp correction. Not cutting is only less painful if you think debt interest payments can be borne and that the deficit can continue. 

When public services are cut, the users of those services suffer most. Those people tend to be those in greatest need. That’s not fair. But show me a fairer way please.

So maybe now is the right time to make the cuts. Maybe it’s not. Maybe they should be made this deep, or maybe we should tax more and cut less. We’ve argued over that and we’ll carry on. Whichever path we’d have gone down, there’d have been nothing fair about today, and there never could’ve been. 

One thing’s for sure though. At some point, soon I hope, it will stop raining and the sun will come out again.

Rick 

I am still somewhat riled by the lack of critical acclaim flowing towards last week’s cuts poem, but I am willing to put it behind me for the national interest. My country needs me, according to my Prime Minister, and I’m up for that challenge even if the last time that phrase was used 9,000,000 people then lost their lives in the First World War.

My weekend was a strange mix of choral music and rollercoasters. On Friday I went to see a concert by “The Sixteen” at the Bridgwater Hall. They’re a choir who sang some staggeringly beautiful music, but whose performance was interspersed with some very odd organ music that sounded to me like a GCSE Casio keyboard composition. Maybe I just didn’t understand it, and I’m sure it was very lovely and all, but the poor man was rewarded on completion by a single audience member applauding and everyone else looking mildly bewildered. There are parallels with the Lib Dem contribution to the coalition government there, I feel…

Anyway, I’d had enough of high culture by then, so went to Alton Towers on Saturday, taking advantage of a buy-one-get-one-free voucher to spend the day in one long queue interrupted by the occasional 30 second burst of high G-force terror.

I hadn’t been there for 15 years, during which time the park had built some truly terrifying rides that do to the body what a fortnight at astronaut training camp can’t. One of them is called Rita, which was my Grandma’s name and had previously been a by-word for cosy teas and days at the seaside, but which will now forever be associated with being flung from 0-100kmh in 2.6 seconds before being subjected to the kind of rickety ride I imagine early Soyuz cosmonauts considered beyond the pale.

Since I was last at Alton Towers as a 13 year old, I have grown to value peace and quiet above screams and candy-floss. Resultantly, I saw things there on Saturday that I imagine I didn’t really notice as a child. For instance, there is a almost certainly a higher concentration of Burger Kings per square inch in Alton Towers than anywhere else on planet Earth. And, whereas I would probably have giggled with the high-octane fun of it all as a teenager, at 29 there is something undignified and downright painful about being whacked repeatedly about the ankles by unmanned metal chairs when on a sparsely-populated swing ride.

A buy one get one free is not a deal I now consider good enough to get me back there. Buy none get one free wouldn’t even do it, in fact. 

Being strapped into a seat and tossed about like a loose-leaf salad was, mournfully, the highlight of the rest of my weekend. The week ahead though promises very little in the way of excitement, and lots of work-based tedium, which will probably have me longing with all my heart for a return to the mayhem of rollercoasters and their overweight, underdressed, loudly-swearing, perpetually-texting, pasty munching, first round of X-Factor teenage girl clientele.

Rick

PS – if you actually want a serious contribution today, this is a good article on fairnessfrom the Guardian which I like much of.

The Conservative conference clunks to an end today. David Cameron will close it by speaking in the main room at the International Conference Centre in Birmingham.

In that very room in 2002 I had my Birmingham University Graduate Ball, at which I found £20 on the floor. If only the government could find free money lying about the place, we’d be in a lot less trouble…

In previous years, when the Tories weren’t in power so it mattered less, and when the Lib Dems weren’t sharing that power, I would probably have chuckled watching them squabble as they have done this week. Now though I feel like a man who’s reluctantly married into the slightly odd family down the road. Now I want them to act normally and succeed doing it, because every mistake they make makes me look bad. Cameron’s announcement yesterday of more marriage tax breaks to compensate stay-at-home mums losing out on Child Benefit is silly for almost every possible reason. When I heard about it it made me want to go and get divorced just to prove a point.

It makes him look weak, it’s a ridiculous intrusion on family life to appease sharp-elbowed Daily Mail readers, and it gives back about 8% of what is being taken away in CB. It also risks alienating lots of people to give crumbs back to mainly-Tory voters who wouldn’t be voting for anyone else anyway. It’s crazy. But apparently it’s “fairer” so that’s why he’s doing it. I think these problems show that our muddled view of fairness is permeating 10 Downing Street. Cameron sold the CB change as “fair”, but was stung by criticism. So he’s giving marriage allowances to make it more “fair”, and in doing so is contradicting his own mantra about not handing out money to the wealthy, which was what he was saying that “fair” meant yesterday.

This uncertainty about fairness needs sorting quickly, and Cameron’s speech today attempts to do it. But I think he’s going about it the wrong way.

In my view, rather than creating “fairness” he should be concentrating on getting rid of “unfairness”. He should be showing how his policies are improvements on the unfairness in the society that Labour left, even if they aren’t perfectly “fair.”

The debate on fairness has been hijacked. Now, in the eyes of the newspapers at least, something is fair only when it negatively affects nobody. Since such entirely pain-free policies don’t exist, nothing is fair.

Striving to make something “fair” is impossible, and the promise of fair cuts is unachievable, as the CB issue proves. A cut taking a government handout from the top 20% is apparently not “fair” according to half the national press and lots of people vox-popped by TV and radio, and so we have the odd sight of Labour attacking it, and the Conservatives backtracking on it. But, if fairness is about everyone paying a reasonable share, the policy is self-evidently more “fair” than what existed before.

Cameron should have gone about selling it in that way. He should have said much more clearly that there exists a huge unfairness in that rich people get state handouts. This is a policy addressing it. It isn’t 100% fair itself, but it’s a start.

A lot fewer people could have argued with that, I suspect, and their arguments could have been much easier dealt with. Any change to the policy would have been further progress down the road of making things less unfair. They wouldn’t have been a back-track, and instead would have been a success.

Pursuading people about the policy on limits to total benefits payments presents the same problem. The government proposal to limit payments is apparently not “fair” because some people currently receive more than the proposed new maximum, and will therefore lose out. The government disagree, saying that it is “fair”. Since ”fair” is subjective, it’s very arguable, and since the government are trying to prove something easy to argue against, they’ll always lose. The longer the government pretend that it is totally fair, the more ammunition they give to the opposition to disprove them. All they need to do is wheel out someone unjustly losing out, and they’ve done cast the whole policy as unfair.

I read this article yesterday, which describes the pain felt by a woman who faces having to move from her home in central London because of Housing Benefit limits. She doesn’t work because she looks after her children, and wants a bigger house in the same area paid for through HB. This is proof, so the article hints, that the new system is anything but “fair.”

And it’s right. The system isn’t fair. But show me one that is. And, more than that, show me not only a benefits system that is fair in isolation, but which has consequences on other systems (education, council tax etc) that are also fair. There isn’t one.

The new system is less unfair though than the old one, and the government should be saying so.

The woman in the article has chosen a lifestyle of her own, and she should be free to make that choice. But support should only be to a certain financial level. The government think the same, and that level has been set at the average salary for the country. If that level can’t support every requirement of this woman or other high claimants then, like everyone else, they should make compromises. It’s unpleasant, and it isn’t entirely fair to everyone. But it’s less unfair than what existed before. More people are giving and receiving their appropriate share.

The debate on fairness has been framed incorrectly by the government. They shouldn’t be trying to convince us that they’re creating a “fair” benefits system. With all of its complexities and its millions of claimants with their millions of different circumstances, it can never be totally fair. The papers will always find the person losing out, because tears sell paper.

They should be claiming, rightly, that the new system is less unfair, is nearer to fair, than the old system. This is a big difference which isn’t being articulated by the government.

Cameron is right when he says in his speech today that “you can’t measure fairness just by how much money we spend on welfare, as though the poor are products with a price tag and the more we spend on them the more we value them.”  

I don’t think you can measure fairness at all. It’s a judgment call, and I think it’s easier to identify unfairness and get rid of some of it than it is to create fairness from scratch.  Focusing on lessening unfairness rather than creating total fairness is more sensible, and less likely to lead to disappointment.  

Obviously there’ll be disagreements on what’s unfair and what’s not (bankers bonuses for instance!), but I think that’s a more sensible debate to have. 

If we stopped saying that things were fair, it would mean the opposition would have to be a lot more sophisticated than just saying that they’re not. We can make a lot of unfair things better even if the results aren’t 100% “fair.”Creating fairness might be impossible, but creating less unfairness isn’t.  Rick