Can Labour really go on like this for another two years?

The weekend saw me in France on a short holiday so I missed the Sunday papers until today when I got home.

The media agenda is dominated by references to the final two years of John Major; when his troubles just mounted and multiplied as the end came of his administration.

I am struck by yet more simularities between Brown and IDS - our party's ill-fated leader during the 2001-2004 darkest hour and the man who was so unceremoniously ousted after little more than two years in the job and replaced with a caretaker leader whose role became avoiding meltdown and stabilising the vote ahead of the looming 2005 general election; a task successfully undertaken by Michael Howard.

The summer lead up to the 2003 Conservative Conference was a vital period of conspiring amongst Tory MP's away from the party Whips in Westminster. Unencumbered by the need to watch who they were seen talking to, MP's freely negotiated the deal from holiday villa's and their gardens over the summer recess all the while briefing journalists that the 2003 conference speech would be IDS' last - as indeed it turned out to be.

The conference itself was surreal; and one I will never forget. I felt I was alone in thinking that changing leader would not make much difference - our poll ratings had actually improved slightly because of IDS' softening tone and focus on caring for the many and not just the few but the party couldn't see past his truly dismal public performances and preferred to retreat to the comfort zone of tough talking on crime and immigration which a change of leader would open the door to.

The entire conference was always going to be about one thing and one thing only, getting rid of IDS as quickly and as peacefully as possible.

I am becoming convinced that Labour will very soon undergo a similar process, not two years after their last leadership coup conference when T Blair was forced into giving a timetable to quit in 2006; I expect the Labour Party conference to be about nothing else - no policies, no plans for the future but instead an orgy of internicine warfare and plotting that could well culminate in him going before Christmas.

This is a change - for ages I have been working on the assumption that because of Labours very Byzantine rules concerning leadership challenges Gordon Brown was unassailable, but the constant drip of stories from MP's and off the record briefings from cabinet ministers - if carried on through the summer silly season- could easily now become too much for Labour MP's to put up with on top of their poll ratings which seem to be going in just one direction.

More importantly it could also become too much for the union bosses who now hold the Labour Party in the palm of their hands and need a reasonable labour movement to survive into the long term, and who also will want to avoid having to cough up the £20m Labour Party overdraft they are reported to be guaranteeing.

Well I agree with you, Nick.

£20bn in spending cuts and tax cuts for the lowest paid - a brilliant proposal yesterday from Nick Clegg (or Cameron Lite as he has become rather cruelly known in some circles).
I couldn't agree more, in fact I was standing for election just two years ago on exactly that platform - cut taxes by £20bn through efficiency savings and spend some of the money on raising the income tax threshold to take the lowest paid out of income tax altogether, proposals which Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson David Laws bitterly criticised, describing them as "implausible and undeliverable". He said at the time: "We don't believe these plans are achievable and nor do the majority of the British public."

What a difference 24 months - three leaders and a third off your polling numbers make, eh?

Now the very same people who brought you 4p on your income tax and a 50p top tax rate are new converts to a new world of lower taxes and swingeing £20bn spending cuts - not sure where from, but no doubt their very own financial wizard (er, don't you mean 'magician' - Ed.) Vince Cable will enlighten us eventually.

I think this potential change in strategy is a wise reaction to the London/C&N/Henley results. Clearly the Lib Dems cannot hope to beat the Conservatives in a face off against them and their best bet of maintaining a credible number of MP’s is to look to make gains in the North to compensate for losses in the South.

I do wonder how all those Labour voters who supported the Lib Dems in seats like Torbay will view Nick Cleggs rightwing conversion, but he must have thought that one through and decided he doesn't need them.

Car Tax- the controversy grows.

At last the mainstream media have picked up on the tickling time bomb that is the vehicle Excise Duty changes due to filter in during next year.

Nearly half of all drivers will be hit with significant rises in Vehicle Excise Duty (VED), while fewer than one in five will see any benefit from the reforms, according to official data.

The figures directly contradict Gordon Brown's claim in the House of Commons that most drivers will actually gain from the changes.

It’s not the car tax itself but the way in which the bad news has been hidden away until extracted by the media later on.

This is stealth taxing, and while Brown could get away with it in the late ’90s when the economy was booming and general taxes were still relatively low nowadays people can readily see it’s a dishonest way to do business.

If this Government was a consumer company they would be a ‘You and Yours’ and ‘Watchdog’ repeat offender.

Living in the Past

In 1993 there was a by-election in the very safe Conservative seat of Newbury following the sudden death of the MP Judith Chaplain.

Newbury had been a safe Tory seat held at every election since 1924. At the general election only the previous year Judith Chaplain had polled 37,000 against the Lib Dems 24,000.

The shock result that night was that the Lib Dem candidate David Rendel won in spectacular style; the Tory vote collapsed to 15,000 and Rendel got in with 37,500 votes - a massive swing of over 28%

The Newbury by election marked the beginning of the end of the Major Government and just as relevant started a domino of by election losses by the Tories in formerly safe seats to the Liberal Democrats, a process that continued right through to the mid 2000's.

Latterly the Lib Dems have found the going much tougher in by elections, indeed the last one or two victories they have had were against Labour in the North. This year their progress has been almost exclusively backwards. In Crewe and Nantwich they came a very poor third but their people at the time were saying 'we didn't think we would do well here anyway, we are targeting Henley...'

Indeed the Lib dem publicity machine has been in overdrive for weeks claiming variously that Henley was "Bromley Mk 2" (Bromley was a by election in 2006 where the Lib Dems came uncomfortably close to winning) and "another Newbury" - indeed as recently as last week our own Lib Dem MP was enlightening his blog readers that Henley would indeed be a repeat of Newbury.

Well it was not to be. Having had a very bad poll published yesterday (Lib dems down to 15% again) the actual result was a bitter blow to the hard working activists who had been led to believe all the hype; the Lib Dem vote went down; and there was a significant swing away from the Lib Dems and to the Conservatives; in an election that saw the Labour vote collapse completely (the came fifth behind BNP and the Greens).

So where does that leave the fabled Lib Dem by election machine? Not 'winning here' anymore thats for sure.

Why did they target a safe Conservative seat when the Conservatives are riding high in the polls? Why go for Conservative votes just at the time when Conservatives are on the up? Why did they target Henley instead of Labour held Crewe and Nantwich?

I have no idea, but as a strategy it makes about as much sense as the Charge of the Light Brigade.

I couldn't put it better than the following contributor to Politicalbetting.com:

'I think it’s pretty clear the Lib Dems have become fixated by their past successes, and believe that all they have to do is repeat the familiar formula to reproduce them. Worse, it appears that some of their activists think that all they have to do is talk about the formula for the ‘magic’ to happen.

There seems to be no understanding that the situation has changed. As Stuart Dickson notes at the top of the thread, the public now want change, and the Lib Dems are not going to be the agent for it - certainly not in their present form anyway.

The voters aren’t interested in kicking the Tories any more, or looking for a ‘Labour-lite’ party, nor are they jaundiced enough about politics in general to want to vote for a ‘b*gger all of them’ party (UKIP’s decline also reflects this).

The Lib Dems rose with Labour and will fall with them too unless they do something to radically differentiate themselves.'

Principled stand or ego trip?
Many people have asked me why my colleague and friend David Davis is apparently throwing away his political career as Shadow Home Secretary over the issue of 42 day detention. His battle is not about that, it is about the much wider erosion of our basic civil liberties that has been sneaking up on us for years.
We are already living in a surveillance society: 600 public bodies (including Torbay Council) have authority to bug your phones and intercept your emails and post - they can also carry out surveillance operations and do so- 1000 a month at the last count.

Officials in Poole spied for weeks on a family taking their children to school to check that they lived inside the catchment area, for instance. The State is treating everyone as a suspect, changing the fundimental principle that they are there to serve us into something much more sinister.If you buy something, or withdraw or deposit more than about £5000 in cash your bank or the seller of the goods has to report you to the aurthorities for 'suspicious behaviour.' As solicitors and accountants know all too well the law has changed to oblige them to spy on their clients as never before, if they fail to report you, they can be prosecuted.our child may already have had his or her DNA sampled and held on the largest database in the world, without your permission or knowledge.Thousands of teenagers having been given an 'informal caution' for which they have had no right of a hearing are now finding they have a police record; in fact millions of people are now routinely 'CRB' checked without realising that you can have a record without ever having been convicted of anything - disclosures show not just convictions, but cautions, reprimands and warnings - even completely unfounded suspicions can be recorded and later reported without your having any right of redress. The Government are planning a national ID card system that will be the most intrusive in the world; and which will allow the authorities to gather even more information about you, again without your knowledge and beyond your control. And to cap it all, our government has granted itself powers to lock it's citizens up for six weeks without even knowing why, let alone being charged with anything. As David Davis himself says "None of this has made us any safer. Violent crime has doubled in 10 years, and the Government continually briefs blood-curdling assessments of the terrorist threat. It is a myth to believe that we can defend our security by sacrificing our fundamental freedoms."

Even as I am writing this I am realising just how far the road of 1984 we have gone under this paranoid Government. I thought I lived in a country where the state institutions exist to serve me and not the other way round. I thought I lived in a country where I would be considered innocent until proven guilty; David Davis' stand has made me realise I don't, which is why I will be strongly supporting him at the by election and I urge all of you to do the same.

Railways - a throwback.

I have spent fifteen hours in the last two days on an ill-fated business trip to Manchester.

In my work I have to travel a fair bit, in fact I drive about 20,000 miles annually on business - mostly conducting interviews for clients as part of my work as a head-hunter for industry.

Every so often I try and use the trains instead, partly because I keep getting bouts of green conscience and partly because people keep telling me I am 'mad' to drive all the time and that the train is less stressful.

And every time I do I am left with the same feelings of puzzlement. How could anyone think that a trip on Britains railways isn't more stressful than driving - or flying, even? Train times, platforms and routes were changed at will, with no warning and often no annoucements. My return train was delayed, then cancelled without apology or alternative being offered so my trip stretched from 5 hours (already an hour longer than driving) to seven and a half hours.

The entire infrastructure is ancient and out of date. The best any Government has managed to do at a cost of billions is slap paint over a few stations and smarten up the trains - it's like putting lipstick on a pig.

This trip yet again refreshed my long held view that the railways are an outmoded, inefficient, inflexible and pointless form of public transport.

We happily dumped the canals when a cheaper and more efficient form of transport arrived, so why did we maintain the railways when they were in turn superceded by the automobile and the plane?

Why do we insist on maintaining thousands and thousands of miles of ancient, crumbling Victorian infrastructure - the platforms and the rails dictate that in the 21st century we are still using heavy, steel wheeled train sets that are inefficient, expensive to run and terribly inflexible?

Most of the train sets operating today were built in the 1970's - just think how far the car has evolved since then; how much more efficient and economical thay are. Our trains are Austin Allegro's in a Toyota Prius age.

Steel wheels and ancient track signalling means massive gaps between trains for safety so while a motoroway is utilised all the time a rail line spends most of it's life empty, all that precious land wasted for 90% of the time.

Wouldn't it have made sense years ago to rip up the tracks and points, and instead lay tarmac roadways along the routes, and put large bendy-bus style road coaches on there that can overtake each other, turn round, stop quickly and where you could introduce real competition and flexibility?

Yes, we need public transport, perhaps more than ever before. But unless we are prepared to allow the public transport system to evolve properly we are doomed. Instead of letting the train take the strain we will continue to drive and let the earth take the strain instead.

And that would be much worse in the long run.

(The last time I suggested this -at a dinner- the audience went berserk with indignation. I am only partly serious but would love to hear a spirited defence of the train network from someone out there.)

Record numbers for Forsyth



After the success of the Norman Tebbit dinner last year I decided to ask his Lordship who he might recommend as a future speaker, and he suggested his friend the novelist Frederick Forsyth.

Now Freddie is famously outspoken on everything from the Royal Family to Europe and I just couldn't wait to ask him along, luckily for us he readily agreed to help on the basis that any friend of Normans was OK by him, I think.

We sold out of the original tickets but very fortunately the Grand have 'stretchable' banqueting suites and nothing else on this Thursday so we have been able to enlarge the room and fit everyone in; so it will be the biggest dinner in Torbay since William Hague came here as leader and hopefully raise lots of money for my growing election fund.

I have a bottle of House of Commons whisky, personally signed by Lady Thatcher only last month, to auction off at the end of the evening along with several signed limited edition copies of Freddies latest book.

I am looking forward to a highly controversial evening, Freddie was also a leading supporter of David Davis' leadership bid and I am busting to find out what he has to say about his unexpected 'stand and fight' decision over civil liberties.

If you haven't already got a ticket you can go on the waiting list by calling the office on 01803 557753 - we have a table of ten (paid for) who have warned us they may have to cancel.