I have been keeping this blog now for more than five years, sometimes more enthusiastically than other times. I began it during the Lib Dem leadership election in 2007, and my first post announced portentously - to the couple of people who saw it - that I was going to vote for Nick Clegg.
"I know him to be one of those few in the Lib Dems who recognise the power of new ideas in politics, who understand that the party desperately needs to have a renewed purpose," I wrote then, and I stand by it now.
But voting for Clegg as leader did not mean any lack of confidence in Chris Huhne. He has a series of absolutely vital achievements under his belt during his foreshortened political career. His cabinet struggles with his Conservative colleagues about the importance of investment will turn out to be hugely significant when the history of these years is written.
I remember talking to him at the special Birmingham conference to ratify the coalition in May 2010, and thinking that I had never seen someone look quite so alive - becoming a Lib Dem cabinet minister must have been surprise enough; I did not then know that he was in a new relationship too.
So the sequence of events which led to the courtroom yesterday is a human tragedy - and more than that. It is a reminder of how fickle fate can be, a kind of memento mori for all of us, which I am desperately trying to keep in perspective.
I watched Nick Clegg fielding questions at the Brighton conference over the weekend, and felt huge confidence in him - as he clearly feels in himself. I didn't agree with everything he said - the Funding for Lending scheme is not a success, and was never going to be (the banks are the wrong infrastructure, but that is another story). I felt secure in my own mind that we had made the right choice in 2007, but I recognise - as I'm sure he does too - how difficult it is to be part of any kind of ferment of new ideas when you are at the heart of government.
What is extraordinary to me is this. Back then, when we chose a leader between Clegg and Huhne - would anyone have believed it if we knew that, five years later, one of them would be deputy prime minister and the other would be in jail?
Why we don't want to re-invent 1945
I found myself on Start the Week this morning with Ken Loach and others talking about class, and talking about his film Spirit of '45.I also talked about my forthcoming book about the squeezed middle, Broke, but let's leave that on one side for a moment.
Since watching the film last week, I have been struggling to articulate what I felt was wrong with the Attlee government and the post-war settlement that is given such heroic and emotional support in Ken Loach's film. The best I can come up with is this: those huge institutions created by Labour to slay Beveridge's Five Giants were not up to the job.
Oh yes, they slayed the giants, but the giants came back to life again - and still come back to life again every generation, and have to be slayed over and over again, and it costs that much more each time. That was not how they were designed and not what was expected - Beveridge expected the NHS and welfare state to get cheaper to run over time, not more expensive.
The trouble was that these institutions also disempowered people. They had their own agendas, their own elites and - more recently - their own dysfunctional targets hollowing them out. Beveridge warned that this would be the case as well, in his report Voluntary Action, and he was ignored.
Watching the Ealing film Passport to Pimlico recently, there is a hint of this too - someone shouts at the officials:
"We're sick and tired of your voice in this country - now shut up!" That sheds some light on why the Attlee government was voted out in 1951.
Ken Loach hinted at something similar, so I can't accuse him of this. But the idea that somehow the Labour creation was betrayed or destroyed by Mrs Thatcher, and we must look back to 1945 and do it all over again, is really nonsense. The truth is that these huge institutions carried the seeds of their own destruction. They carried the Thatcherite revolution within them, because they did not work - they disempowered, undermined communities, poured scorn on self-help, worshipped professionals, and never asked for anything back - which meant they failed to build community around them.
But how do you explain all that in about 30 seconds? Most of my attempts end up with me being pigeon-holed either as a conservative (that I want to sell off the welfare state) or that I am a socialist (I want to build it all again, just the same). I don't believe either of those. We need to somehow mould what we've got into something far more flexible and far more effective - and do it very fast.
That requires people who are capable of making relationships with the people they are trying to help - which is precisely the opposite direction the big welfare institutions have been going. It means the very opposite of economies of scale. Whatever it means, it certainly doesn't mean going back to 1945.
Happy birthday, William Cobbett - we need you now
I'm very grateful to the King of the Lib Dem bloggers, Jonathan Calder, for reminding me that it is William Cobbett's 250th birthday - actually yesterday. But perhaps after a quarter of a millennium, being a day late doesn't matter.Cobbett returned to England as a Tory, but the critical moment in his conversion to what I believe was a ferocious proto-Liberalism, came in 1805, a few months before Nelson’s historic destruction of Napoleon’s naval ambitions. He bought a farm outside the Hampshire
Having been offered, and refused, a share of the national debt as one of the placement he derided, he also took a second look at the writings of Thomas Paine, the great British libertarian he had condemned so roundly before. Once he had done so, he was particularly struck by what Paine had to say about the financial system and, from there, he slowly became aware of the scale of the bribery, money-lending and sinecures on offer around him. Pitt’s friend Henry Dundas, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was charged with using public money for private speculation. The army commander-in-chief, the Grand old Duke of York, was letting his mistress sell army commissions on his behalf.
This was what Cobbett came to know and condemn as The Thing – the great mountain of placemen and pensioners paid for by the struggling farmers and labourers of the nation.
The superstructure of The Thing, as he saw it, was the burgeoning financial services in
Inspired by Paine, Cobbett suddenly regarded the nation he became famous by defending differently. It was ruled, not so much by a government – and certainly not by a king of doubtful sanity – but by a financial system, and one which had “drawn the real property of the nation into fewer hands … made land and agriculture objects of speculation ... in every part of the kingdom, moulded many farms into one … almost entirely extinguished the race of small farmers … we are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents.”
Almost unwittingly, Cobbett was following the long agrarian tradition of deep scepticism about money, suspicion of banking and finance, and an implicit appeal to what was genuinely important. It was the ‘real property of the nation’, that Cobbett was defending. Not the stuff of fashion and instant wealth. Being in Hampshire also raised his awareness of the plight of ordinary labourers once the commons had been enclosed.
When he was campaigning to protect his own heath from enclosure, he ran across a Parliamentary report which estimated that there were a million paupers in
For Cobbett, it was the greed of middlemen and bourgeois speculators that was driving ordinary people from the land, which was their only guarantee of independence and subsistence. Those who remained were being squeezed by
What is extraordinary is how relevant this critique is today. The Thing, the corrosive hoovering up of the wealth of the nation by speculators, is at least as important as it was in Cobbett's day. Probably even more.
Why economists can add but not subtract
More than a decade ago, I wrote a book called The Tyranny of Numbers, which was an early attempt to puncture a hole in the cult of statistics, evidence-based policy and the corrosion of intuition and common sense that goes with it.
It had a whiff of naivety about it, I admit. Of course there are times when a good bit of measurement can take a situation by surprise. You don't want to lose that option. But I was staggered recently, working in a government department at rather closer quarters than usual, to find how much the cult of measurement has progressed - almost no conversation seems possible without it being littered with statistics, some of them helpful, some of them really rather dodgy.
The great problem with this is that numbers look authoritative, but they tend to be attached to descriptions. The numbers look hard but they are chained inexorably to words, which are endlessly malleable. What looks so objective and certain is actually nothing of the kind.
Worse than that. The most important things in life are not actually measurable at all - disease and violence may be measurable, but health and love are not. You have to take measurements of something else and hope that they relate to each other - and usually they don't.
But of all the sins of statistics which we are lumbered with every day, really the bogus economic cost-benefit analysis takes the biscuit.
I thought of this earlier in the week when I was confronted with a suspect study commissioned by the pro-Heathrow lobby which claims that £8.5 billion will be lost if Heathrow isn't expanded.
Here the consultants at Oxford Economics have gone away and worked out what the potential spending power of visitors to Britain would be from China is Heathrow was expanded. That is all it is. But they seem to have ignored the disbenefits - the costs of expanding Heathrow in terms of health, destruction, climate change and pollution, and sleepless nights for those living in west London.
Would the UK actually be richer because of the money? No, because there are also costs involved and those haven't been factored in - because, for some reason, economists seem unable to do subtraction.
It was the same with the studies urging the government to end restrictions on supermarket opening hours, explaining how much extra earning there would be - but nothing about the costs at all.
GDP is the same: it adds up the goods but doesn't subtract the bads. Or as the economist Clifford Cobb and his colleagues put it in their 1994 article 'If the economy is up, why is America down?': "The nation's central measure of well being works like a calculating machine that adds but cannot subtract."
It is time someone called time on this nonsense. Time, in fact, for a Campaign for Real Knowledge, not hedged around with bogus cost-benefits and which is capable of describing the world as it really is. And to do that, numbers are really too much of a blunt instrument.
It had a whiff of naivety about it, I admit. Of course there are times when a good bit of measurement can take a situation by surprise. You don't want to lose that option. But I was staggered recently, working in a government department at rather closer quarters than usual, to find how much the cult of measurement has progressed - almost no conversation seems possible without it being littered with statistics, some of them helpful, some of them really rather dodgy.
The great problem with this is that numbers look authoritative, but they tend to be attached to descriptions. The numbers look hard but they are chained inexorably to words, which are endlessly malleable. What looks so objective and certain is actually nothing of the kind.
Worse than that. The most important things in life are not actually measurable at all - disease and violence may be measurable, but health and love are not. You have to take measurements of something else and hope that they relate to each other - and usually they don't.
But of all the sins of statistics which we are lumbered with every day, really the bogus economic cost-benefit analysis takes the biscuit.
I thought of this earlier in the week when I was confronted with a suspect study commissioned by the pro-Heathrow lobby which claims that £8.5 billion will be lost if Heathrow isn't expanded.
Here the consultants at Oxford Economics have gone away and worked out what the potential spending power of visitors to Britain would be from China is Heathrow was expanded. That is all it is. But they seem to have ignored the disbenefits - the costs of expanding Heathrow in terms of health, destruction, climate change and pollution, and sleepless nights for those living in west London.
Would the UK actually be richer because of the money? No, because there are also costs involved and those haven't been factored in - because, for some reason, economists seem unable to do subtraction.
It was the same with the studies urging the government to end restrictions on supermarket opening hours, explaining how much extra earning there would be - but nothing about the costs at all.
GDP is the same: it adds up the goods but doesn't subtract the bads. Or as the economist Clifford Cobb and his colleagues put it in their 1994 article 'If the economy is up, why is America down?': "The nation's central measure of well being works like a calculating machine that adds but cannot subtract."
It is time someone called time on this nonsense. Time, in fact, for a Campaign for Real Knowledge, not hedged around with bogus cost-benefits and which is capable of describing the world as it really is. And to do that, numbers are really too much of a blunt instrument.
Reviving the economy, city by city
There I was in Portcullis House a few mornings ago, for the launch of The Green Book, and I have been wondering what the answer is to the co-editor Duncan Brack's rhetorical question. Why do Liberals produce so many coloured books - from the Yellow Book that introduced the ideas of John Maynard Keynes in 1928 right through to the embattled Orange Book?I don't know the answer, I must admit, but can't help feeling that it is a sign of intellectual activity. I have often wondered whether there were any intellectual signs of life in the Lib Dems, at least since the untimely death of Conrad Russell - but all these coloured books show the place may be twitching into intellectual life again after a long slumber.
Neil Stockley wrote a fascinating chapter of the new book on green political narratives, which is important - because green policy can be exhaustingly specific and rather worthy once the Lib Dems get their hands on it. But what I really wanted to write about - rather immodestly - is my own chapter about how to revive local economies, one by one.
I suggested three important propositions:
1. It isn't how much money is going into an area that really counts, it is how much money is staying put.
2. Vital assets are more than just financial - they involve finding the assets among the wasted people of a suffering city.
3. We need local institutions - and particularly local banks.
It seems to me that these are the bones of a new Liberal approach to economics, which doesn't wait around hopelessly for recovery to come - but doesn't just beg for inward investment either. The assets are there locally, even in the poorest places - waste material, wasted land and buildings, wasted imagination, wasted money flowing through. We need an economic approach capable of reviving cities, using their own resources, one by one.
We are in the early stages of stitching this together, and I keep on finding new organisations that are beavering successfully away at aspects of this, from Transition Towns Re:conomy programmes to the community development financial institutions which have been such a success in the USA.
And to confirm that this is the way forward, there is a new report published by the think-tank Respublica, by one of the most intelligent regeneration commentators, Julian Dobson. He puts it rather differently, but the approach is related. And he emphasises different starting points:
1. Secure and affordable local housing.
2. Localising employment support to make it more effective - this isn't a problem of public versus private, incidentally; it is big versus small.
3. Using public services as the engines of local renewal, training local people and rebuilding the social infrastructure.
This last one is absolutely vital, and I think it is a really important new direction for policy: how do we reshape public services to have a double or triple effect - tackling social and health problems, but also preventing them recurring, and rebuilding the social and economic fabric around them, all at the same time?
That is the issue - and it is a good deal more important than the question of whether services are better run by one sector rather than another.
Why bankers' bonuses are making the rest of us poorer
There I was encouraging mainstream political parties to be a little more populist in order to beat the joke parties, from the Tea Party to UKIP and Beppe Grillo - to stop being so forgiving to big corporations and big bureaucracies just because their role ought to be important. To see behind the management speak and corporate slosh.
I'm not quite so naive that I expect George Osborne to glance at my blog before taking major decisions. But of all the reasons to storm off to Brussels, cheered along by Boris Johnson, defending the right of banks to pay whatever inflationary bonuses they want really is really getting priorities skewed.
If that is the way the Conservative Party sees their most important objectives in Brussels - well then, they deserve to be beaten by populist headbangers. They also will be.
But what is most infuriating about Osborne and Johnson is that they don't see the damage that the bonus culture in banking is doing to us.
It encourages bankers to pay attention to global speculation rather than providing the loans for productive business.
It squanders the imagination and talent of the brightest and the best, by luring them out of the real economy - and damages the nation's prospects as a result.
It prices homes out of the reach of buyers and renters alike in the capital.
It corrodes the values of the hard-working middle classes, who they claim to support - by making their efforts and their earnings look ridiculous.
It corrodes and subverts the economy.
There is another question - I know - about whether the European bonus cap will be effective. I suspect it will be one of a raft of measures that will be needed. But why don't they see that bankers bonuses are making the rest of us poorer?
And why are they not prioritising the business of breaking up RBS, turning it into the effective lending infrastructure we so badly need? Osborne and Johnson are like First World War generals, desperately trying to fight the last war but one - and consequently losing the present one.
I'm not quite so naive that I expect George Osborne to glance at my blog before taking major decisions. But of all the reasons to storm off to Brussels, cheered along by Boris Johnson, defending the right of banks to pay whatever inflationary bonuses they want really is really getting priorities skewed.
If that is the way the Conservative Party sees their most important objectives in Brussels - well then, they deserve to be beaten by populist headbangers. They also will be.
But what is most infuriating about Osborne and Johnson is that they don't see the damage that the bonus culture in banking is doing to us.
It encourages bankers to pay attention to global speculation rather than providing the loans for productive business.
It squanders the imagination and talent of the brightest and the best, by luring them out of the real economy - and damages the nation's prospects as a result.
It prices homes out of the reach of buyers and renters alike in the capital.
It corrodes the values of the hard-working middle classes, who they claim to support - by making their efforts and their earnings look ridiculous.
It corrodes and subverts the economy.
There is another question - I know - about whether the European bonus cap will be effective. I suspect it will be one of a raft of measures that will be needed. But why don't they see that bankers bonuses are making the rest of us poorer?
And why are they not prioritising the business of breaking up RBS, turning it into the effective lending infrastructure we so badly need? Osborne and Johnson are like First World War generals, desperately trying to fight the last war but one - and consequently losing the present one.
The selfishness of South West Trains
Now I’ve heard the lot. Sitting on Guildford Station early this morning, I heard an admonishing computerised message – presumably inspired by South West Trains - warning me not to take my bicycle on peak trains because of the discomfort to my fellow beings.
I can take folding bikes, of course (they have not banned those yet), but ordinary cycles “cause discomfort for your fellow passengers and can cause delay”.
They can certainly cause discomfort occasionally, but why is this? Because of the miserable failure of the train companies to build trains capable of carrying them. So I don’t take it kindly to having my wrist slapped for being thoughtless, when it wasn’t cyclists who were thoughtless.
These things often work both ways. What really causes discomfort in this case is a boneheaded pursuit of a narrow kind of efficiency and poor design.
Perhaps the train companies could not reasonably have anticipated the explosion of cycling, but for the last century people have avoided driving by taking bikes on trains. The new generation of train companies unfortunately prefer their passengers to be rationalised so they can be easy to process.
That is how they come to accuse cyclists of causing discomfort to people just because they want to take the outrageous step their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did - take their bikes on trains. Selfish, that's what it is!
That is how they come to accuse cyclists of causing discomfort to people just because they want to take the outrageous step their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did - take their bikes on trains. Selfish, that's what it is!
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