I was in Saffron Walden last weekend to help the local Lib Dems campaigning for the local elections which in common with most of the district councils in England along with the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly go to the polls next Thursday. In Saffron Walden the Lib Dems are in control of the local council (Uttlesford) and are campaigning to retain it - good luck to them! Shown here are Bridget Fox, the next MP for Islington South & Finsbury, Cllr Lucy Watt and Emma of Islington Lib Dems.
Another quite good speech from Blair on Europe. The problem has never been so much his words or his views on Europe - some of his speeches have been outstanding, even if as today his views are far from perfect - but his willingness actually to do anything about them.
I am persuaded that when he says things about improving Europe - and particularly about going out and making the case for it to the public - he does actually mean it. It’s just when it comes to actually doing anything about it, it never seemed to happen. Days from announcing his departure, he is hardly going to start now. British pro-Europeans feel extremely let down Blair on Europe - much more so that by Major, for example, who didn’t think of himself as a European as Blair does - and it’s entirely his own fault.
The next Prime Minister, by contrast, has made no pretence of saying the right thing about Europe - moving from being a decent pro-European when in opposition, to one of its loudest critics when in office. And despite some speculation, no-one seems to have the faintest idea what his approach will be from Number Ten.
I’m absolutely in favour of teenagers not getting drunk or putting them on a path to becoming alcoholics - which is why I am completely against these proposals from Alcohol Concern for it to be illegal.
The best way of getting teenagers to want to drink too much is to tell them it is some forbidden fruit which they are not allowed to have. Have the authors of this proposal never come across the fact that, as a cartoon I saw recently put it “the best way to get something done is to tell your children not to do it”?
The consequences of making alcohol unattainable are very clear from Sweden and Norway which make it very difficult to purchase alcohol and as a result have some of the worst drunkenness figures of anywhere. Just compare this with the countries of southern Europe where children learn to live with drink from a young age and consequently don’t grow up wanting to consume excessive quantities of it.
As part of children growing up they should learn about alcohol: clearly not force-fed huge quantities of it, but allowed to try it appropriately.
And if there is a problem with young teenagers drinking alcohol excessively - which there seems to be some limited evidence there might be - then preventing their parents from giving them small quantities is hardly going to address it.
Fortunately this proposal is so wrong that even this nanny government isn’t prepared to take it forward - Caroline Flint, the relevant Minister, dismissing it on Today this morning.
Tony Blair has been defending the global ‘war on terror’ this week, arguing that we need to stamp on terrorism wherever it exists.
Well, about some of this he is right. He is right that there are some people out there who are out to destroy our way of life. (Their religion isn’t the cause of that, it’s simply the banner under which they fight, much as it was for those fighting the crusades a millennium ago). And he is right that there are some people in this country and elsewhere in the west, who think we can respond effectively to that simply with inaction or woolly understanding.
If we want to preserve the principles we value - liberty, democracy, equality, for example - then we absolutely need to be prepared to be robust in taking action to defend them.
But where he is wrong is to think that the policies that he and the current President of the United States of America have followed, are doing that effectively.
I really can’t stand Anne Atkins, and the rightwing nonsense drivel she comes out with on Thought for the Day on the Today programme. This morning her take on the Lucie Blackman case was, as far as I could tell, that the bloke accused should have been found guilty because (a) she was “young and beautiful” (her words) and (b) because her parents loved her very much.
I’m OK with the legal system displaying a bit of humanity where appropriate, but I am really not convinced that this a good solid basis for justice…
Last night I wandered out into the garden with my new camera - and right on cue, two robins came down to use the bird table (later joined by a couple of blue tits). So I was able to try out my new camera - while also proving that you can still find robins in a small urban garden not too far from the centre of London.
April’s edition of Prospect has quite an interesting lengthy interview with Ken Livingstone, in which he sets out his views on quite a broad range of issues facing London. It also has a range of other associated articles, including a plea from Simon Jenkins on behalf of the rights of London’s ‘villages’, and a case from Andrew Adonis for the reformed House of Lords to be based in Manchester.
Ken is, as we know, keen to meet the housing crisis and demand for places to live, by increasing housing density in London to the levels of Paris and Madrid, including by building more very tall buildings. He is right that London is much less dense in terms of housing than other major European cities, but I don’t agree with him that piling more properties into more intense developments is the answer, or what Londoners want. He claims it can be done by “having intensive development around transport nodes, which can be medium rise, the sort of stuff you’ve got in Kensington and Notting Hill”. But that isn’t the way it’s coming out around where I live, where his high targets for intensity in new developments means some quite heavily over-developed proposals, which face serious opposition from local people. He’s right that the sorts of buildings you build are as important as the density statistics, but sheer intensity is also a crucial part of the picture too.
I’m not involved in the Labour party and don’t have any special insight into it, but for a party which has perhaps the smoothest transition ever between leaders about to come off, it really does seem to be remarkably unsettled. Every day there seems to be rumours about how unhappy everyone is. And maybe it’s just because I’m an outsider, but the deputy leadership campaign going on, although proceeding quite happily as a contest in itself, seems to be taking place in remarkable isolation from the discussion about the future of the party. But maybe that’s just because I’m not privy to the Labour party debates on it - most of my contact is from a few Labour friends plugging their favoured candidate on Facebook, around Facebook, here, or elsewhere (for example here).
For what it’s worth I’ve long said that I think the Labour party, in everything except the short term, is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire in going from Blair to Brown. Yes Blair certainly has his failings (don’t get me started on his so-called policy on Europe, for example), and obviously has Iraq hanging round his neck, but I think it will take the Labour party about ten seconds after he goes to start kicking themselves that they didn’t realise how good he was while they had him. It is very far from historically inevitable that Labour is credible and electable and acceptable to middle England - something a lot of post-1997 Labour people seem to have forgotten.
I can never see Brown being popular - he certainly doesn’t have the Richard & Judy charm of Blair - OK, it’s easy to deride Blair for that, but it was that more than anything else which convinced Britain that Labour was electable again. And by all accounts Brown’s style of management and working makes Blair’s look positively open and collegiate. I find it extremely difficult to see the public ever warming to him.
Brown is (quite rightly, from his point of view) very keen to show that his government is new and fresh and different from the Blair government of 1997-2007. He’s making a big fuss of his first 100 days and no doubt they will be full of whizzes and bangs. I imagine that if the public are polled, say, three months after he becomes PM then they will say lots of things have changed and he is doing a good job.
But the idea that it will be a different government is of course in reality nonsense. Policy on all the issues that Brown cares about over the last ten years has been dictated by Brown - in fact to a quite staggering degree, across every government department with the exception only really of defence and foreign affairs (and perhaps to some extent education). He might move from No 11 to No 10 but the person driving policy in all these areas will remain the same over the next few years as it has been over the last ten. And this will in the end be evident. My guess is that the same public, if asked after, say, a year of a Brown premiership if things are different to how they were under Blair, they will be clear that they aren’t. And that will of course be right.
Forget policy details, forget day-to-day rows over IT project overspends, forget even the state of the economy: the public have an innate sense that after a few years it’s time for a change and time to give the other lot a go. The only thing a government can vary about that is how long it takes them to reach that point. Brown knows that and that’s why he wants people to think his government is a new and different one - but I can’t see him succeeding.