Category: Politics and economics

Lies are a rarity in British public service.  Most public servants know to avoid them, for a simple reason: they will be found out.  The nature of modern government means that everything is somewhere recorded (usually in writing), subject to exposure or liable to be the subject of legal action.   Public servants, in the best tradition of Sir Humphrey, can prevaricate, obfuscate, divert or distract, but if they’ve got any sense, they don’t say things they know to be untrue.

The Brexit campaign was bizarre, and alien to our political culture.  There were not only deliberate lies (for example, about Turkey’s entry to the EU), but deliberate and flagrant breaches of electoral law.  It’s not going too far to describe those breaches as ‘corrupt’ – the first legislation on electoral spending was, if I have it right, contained in the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883.  Now, two elections on, we’ve seen a repetition of many of the same practices. 40 new hospitals and 50,000 nurses belong with the lie on the Brexit bus.

The cavalcade of lies is spearheaded by Boris Johnson.  The Conservative journalist Peter Oborne, horrified by what’s going on, is maintaining a tally at https://boris-johnson-lies.com/ .  I suspect he’s finding it hard to keep up.  Only this morning, the Guardian reports preposterous things being circulated about prostitution, immigration and spending,  and less preposterous (but false) statements about state aid, trade unions, tax and defence.

The main offenders are the Conservative party, but the Labour opposition is not exempt.  Accused of a ‘mendacious fiction’ in saying that the Labour Party had deal with all cases of antisemitism, Jeremy Corbyn did not try to say (in his interview with Andrew Neil) that the statement he’d made was true; he said only that the accuser would have to prove that it was ‘mendacious’, or deliberately untrue.  So the statement was false, but not intended to deceive?  Politicians really ought to be aware that people will on occasion listen to the words they use and judge them accordingly.

I’ve been irritated by the apparent failure of BBC journalists, in questions put to both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP,  to understand what a minority government is or how it works.  It’s not difficult: we’ve got a minority government at the moment, we’ve had minority governments before (e.g. under Wilson in 1974) and the SNP is technically a minority government in Scotland.  The 2010 Coalition was not a minority government; it had a majority.

Every question which asks minority parties, “who would you support for Prime Minister?”, is irrelevant.  The whole point about minority governments is that they don’t have majority support.  All that has to happen is that there is not actually a vote of no confidence – that minority parties abstain.

In principle, a minority government should work by selecting policies or legislation which can command support – policies that will get through Parliament.  This approach has been undermined to some degree by the present Conservative administration’s refusal to compromise or act as if is in a minority, but there’s nothing wrong with the principle; the current government has simply demonstrated, through repeated losses, how ridiculous it is to ignore the parliamentary numbers.  This election has been called because of the government’s refusal to compromise – not on the Withdrawal Agreement, which had reached a second reading, but on the sweeping authoritarian  powers (“Henry VIII” powers, in the jargon) that they were determined to enact.    Any majority government which took that position would represent an existential threat to our democracy.

A minority government is not a bad thing; it can be a good one.  Lacking a majority forces governments to common ground or compromise, and in our present predicament those are positions devoutly to be wished.  Unfortunately, no-one can actually vote for a minority government; it’s not on the ballot.  All you can do is to vote for a minority party, in the assurance that if there are enough minority parties, there won’t be a majority government.   And that promises a better outcome than any prospective majority government is likely to offer.

I’m delighted to report that my 2006 book, Liberty, equality fraternity, is now available free on open access at the Policy Press website.  From the website:

“Paul Spicker’s book takes the three founding principles of the French Revolution – Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – and examines how they relate to social policy today. The book considers the political and moral dimensions of a wide range of social policies, and offers a different way of thinking about each subject from the way it is usually analysed.

The book is in three main parts, one part devoted to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in turn. Each part explores the elements and dimensions of the key concept, its application to policy, its interrelationship with the other two principles, and how policies have developed to promote the principle in society. The conclusion outlines three models of radical politics, based on the main concepts.”

The book presents several arguments that are quite original, it refers only to examples from life, and it hasn’t dated.

This is the sixth of my books to be available freely to all.  Find it and others on my open access page.

Plaid Cymru have done what they can to stop anyone who isn’t very determined from finding their manifesto on the web, but here’s a link.  There are echoes of several other manifestos – green jobs, avoiding Brexit with a People’s vote, improving mental health, and animal welfare among them.  But there are also some interesting further initiatives – up to forty hours free childcare, a new system of support for renters, and the possibility at least of decriminalising drugs.

It seems to me that there’s an appetite in several opposition parties for  rather more radical solutions than either Conservative or Labour have been ready to countenance.  Their critics will say that that’s because they won’t have to pass these policies in practice, but the support for parties which are trying out unfamiliar ideas should at least be an indicator of a change in the political wind.

It’s a small but obvious point.  You vote, in the UK, for a constituency MP.  Most MPs (but not all) have affiliations to a political party, but in principle  you are voting for the MP, not a party – which is why some Conservative MPs and some Labour MPs  have been able to change their allegiance and join different parties.

This General Election is not, and cannot be, a contest for votes between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. Our electoral system works quite differently.  If in 2015 you voted under the misapprehension you were voting for David Cameron as PM, you got Theresa May.  If in 2017 you voted for Theresa May, you got Boris Johnson.  The same would have been true if you voted for Tony Blair in 2005, Thatcher in 1987 or Wilson in 1974.

For what it’s worth, I live in North-East Fife, the most marginal seat in the country – in the 2017 election, there were only two votes between the SNP and the Liberal party.  Labour, Conservatives and the Brexit party are not really in contention.  Nevertheless, I’ve now had three glossy cards through my door from the SNP which offer me photographs, not of SNP politicians, but of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.  I should be able to create a set of placemats that will be the talk of my friends.

I was invited yesterday to talk at a student-led conference on alternative paradigms in economics, part of the movement for Rethinking Economics.  My main subject was Basic Income, but I also had the opportunity in a panel discussion to say things about economic growth and climate change.  Half of that argument concerns growth.  I put the case that, while there is both good and bad development, development had had substantial effects in improving welfare, by tests  such as infant mortality.  Growth matters in three ways: because growth goes hand in hand with development; because large parts of local economies are concerned with primary production, and they need growth to live; and because, as Crosland argued,  it’s not politically possible to redistribute resources in a shrinking economy.

The other half concerns climate change.  I don’t claim to have any special insight into the science, but I think I know something about policy responses, and I think we can state with confidence that the way into a problem is rarely the way out of it.  The argument for ‘mitigation’ – stopping humans from generating climate change –  assumes we can reverse all trends and change all behaviours.  I see no evidence that we can.  What matters is ‘adaptation’.  If, for example, we’re going to need to relocate hundreds of millions of people, we need to start now.  And even if we don’t need to, there’s a message to be drawn from the hundreds of thousands of people currently struggling to move from unliveable environments.