The liberal conscience in me would very much like to think that there will be consequences for the Evening Standard for the way it has behaved over the last few weeks. For the duration of the campaign it has turned itself from a relatively respectable newspaper with some journalistic integrity, with a generally right of centre agenda, into a full-scale campaigning newspaper for Boris Johnson. Its headlines, and perhaps most powerfully of all the billboards it has prominently displayed around London, have carried headlines which would have shamed the writers of the most partisan party campaigning literature for their cheerful disregard for balanced fact.

This matters, of course, because the Evening Standard is the only proper newspaper in London (for those who aren’t familiar with the rather odd newspaper situation in London, there is also one morning paper, and two afternoon ones, all distributed free on the Tube, two of the three of which are lite versions of the Standard itself, and all three of which are broadly speaking rubbish).

Now I don’t have a problem with the right of anyone to run a newspaper and through it promote a particular political agenda – and I certainly don’t think there is a strong case for extending to newspapers, even monopolistic ones like the Standard, the requirements for impartiality which are (rightly) imposed on broadcasters.
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The most depressing thing is that, as soon as I saw the headline on the BBC News page, even though it was unattributed, I knew it was from a Lib Dem MP.

Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, is apparently to propose an amendment to weights and measures legislation, to make bars and pubs sell wine in smaller glasses.

Now, the reasons for doing this are pretty straightforward - to encourage people to drink less. And of course the health of anyone who visits a pub reasonably often would indeed benefit from drinking less alcohol.

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I read a report in the Observer over the weekend that a new grouping called the Alcohol Health Alliance will launch this week, calling for a 10% rise in taxation on booze, and a ban on advertising it on TV before 9pm - and I see that they have today launched their campaign. The Observer went further, going on to quote a Professor Sir Michael Marmot from University College London, as saying that that doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that alcohol prices should be doubled, to discourage people from drinking - indeed this is highlighted in the article’s headline “Call for price of bring to double to cut bingeing”. Their piece generally runs through all the evils of drinking, and why the government is concerned about this.

Now, I don’t seek to dispute for a moment the medical and other evidence that alcohol is quite clearly bad for your health. This is particularly true in relation to young people, a focus for this article and these calls.

But what I find extraordinary is the Observer’s - and indeed even the BBC’s - apparently unquestioning acceptance that the government should obviously therefore be looking into further restricting access to it. While they do both briefly quote a spokesman from the British Beer and Pub Association pointing out that doing any of this would ‘further restrict personal freedoms’, it is quite clear that they are only really interested in the case for doing some of this. (I see here that the drinks industry has launched its own salvo in reply to this initiative, but a self-interested response from the industry with a direct financial interest hardly qualifies as a response on the principle).

This incredibly authoritarian and nanny-ish government does actually seem to have brainwashed us all that it is acceptable to prevent people taking decisions about their own lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Blair’s speech raised a vitally important debate - and he was more right than many of those who have attacked him.

I’ve been trying to work out what I think about Blair’s speech about the media this week. Fundamentally I think a lot of what he says is right - the relationship between politicians and the media is really quite unhelpful, and certainly doesn’t help the British public by allowing intelligent debate about public issues. Bluntly, the media’s approach promotes the image of politicians as charlatans and chancers, when in fact pretty much every single politician, of any party, went into politics because they wanted to contribute to the public debate and improve Britain. This is a travesty (and apart from anything else politics in fact offers very thin pickings for a charlatan or a chancer!).

So this is an important debate. Much of what he said needs to be said and as Steve Richards says, most politicians are for understandable reasons too scared of upsetting the media to say it.

Blair is obviously right that the media world is constantly changing, and that this isn’t necessarily how we expected it would change - for example the role of blogs and “citizen journalism”. But we knew that. In fact one of the fairer criticisms I have heard of the speech was that didn’t contain very much that was new.

Much of the rest of the criticism of it, I found very depressing. It simply confirmed so much of what he had said. Political opponents and the press all leaped in, to argue that Blair had no right to say any of that, because he himself bore a lot of responsibility for corroding the relationship. Blair had of course of acknowledged this in the speech, but made a decent effort to get beyond allocating blame (the media and other politicians are not blameless either) and reflect on some of the broader issues. Other politicians, predictably, attacked him for it because they knew, and Blair explained in his speech, that that’s what they have to do to get covered. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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I spent half my childhood and early adulthood in cathedrals so I do have some idea of the challenges of running one, and also how common it is for people to smoke in them (not very). So I was sorry to see that English cathedrals seem to have allowed themselves to be used as ammunition in the attack on the government’s nanny statism. This won’t do the perception of cathedrals or churches as modern places of worship where normal people might want to go, any good at all, which I think is regrettable.

The row has arisen because of the introduction of the smoking ban in public places on 1 July, which require them to put up a sign saying that it is against the law to smoke in cathedrals or churches. You can certainly make the case that this is unnecessary, but the idea that it is a real problem, or in the words of the Bishop of Fulham “stark staring mad”, seems to me to be nonsense. Every public entrance to a church or cathedral has a noticeboard, which could very easily accommodate a sign no larger than a piece of A4 paper - without taking such prominence as to dominate the entrance of the monarch to Westminster Abbey during the next coronation service, as was raised during the Today programme this morning (again by the Bishop of Fulham, I think).

The irony is, of course, that it’s quite right that this government is entirely nanny-statist, and when the church sometimes attacks them for that then I think that can be very helpful - but there really are some rather more important examples of this than churches being required to put a piece of A4 paper on their noticeboards. I do think it’s regrettable that churches and cathedrals have given their name to this rather silly story.

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.

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.

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Two good things about last night’s meeting of the party’s Federal Policy Committee - one from the point of view of Lib Dem policy-making, and one a bit more personal.

The one that should benefit the party’s policy-making is that we had ‘early’ discussions of two areas where FPC will be taking policy papers to autumn conference this year. One of the points about our policy-making process that many, including me in Wasted Rainforests, have made, is that FPC should take much more ownership of the policy papers that it takes to Conference in its name: in the past FPC has only had a full discussion of the final paper at a very late stage, when printing deadlines are looming. So we have changed the process and last night’s meeting was one of the first occasions when we had a full discussion of what you might call a ‘pre-final’ draft of two papers that the world will be seeing in the run up to autumn conference. Not having the pressure of a full final paper and an imminent deadline allowed for some quite full and helpful discussion of the issues. We’d already had discussions of them both with the chairs of the working groups, and it should all help to contribute to more considered and consistent sets of proposals from FPC to Conference.

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