HoodieTV: Ming must stay

Welcome to a much-delayed second edition of HoodieTV.

This week's episode deals with Ming Campbell's leadership of the party, and the reason why he must stay and see us through to the next General Election.

Ming Campbell – constitutionally incoherent

The Liberal Democrats have submitted a Parliamentary motion, attempting to trigger a General Election. On his blog, Ming Campbell justifies the move, writing:

Before the last General Election Tony Blair pledged to serve a full third term and the British electorate voted for him on this basis.

Now the Prime Minister is leaving it is only right that the British public have their say on who will be their next Prime Minister.

It’s an odd position to take, because a General Election isn’t an opportunity for the people to elect their Prime Minister. A General Election is a chance for voters to choose a local MP. And as long as the executive remains melted into the legislature under the quirky Westminster system, we’ll never be able to choose our Prime Minister directly.

Ah, reply the Mingers, but each local MP is elected on a pledge to fulfil their manifesto promises. Each Labour MP in the Commons was elected on the understanding that Tony Blair would serve out a whole term as Prime Minister. That’s no longer true, so no Labour MP has a mandate to serve. Bring on the Election!

But hang on. The “full third term” pledge wasn’t made in the Labour Party’s manifesto. Blair may have written in the manifesto that he wouldn’t seek a fourth term – but the promise to serve a “full third term” was made during an Andrew Marr interview. Clearly, politicians should be honest in interviews, but it’s really pushing it to say that an interview answer forms a solemn contract with the electorate. And although MPs should be held to account for the way they vote in Parliament, I fail to see how each individual MP must take personal responsibility for their party leader's career plans.

There have been times when the Government really has broken a manifesto promise – for example, by introducing the tuition fees they had “legislated to prevent” – but we didn’t call for a snap General Election. It would have been far more justifiable then than it is now, so why didn’t we?

Because that’s just not what these motions are for. Despite presumably enjoying Conservative support, Ming’s motion stands no chance of passing. Like all opposition motions, it’s a way for a party to set out its own views, contrast them with those of the Government, and claw its way into the next day’s papers.

So this reaction by the Lib Dems is a criminal waste. We get little enough airtime as it is, and we should use it constructively, in the public interest. With no immediate prospect of forming a majority Government, we don’t need to be scraping around for fractions of a percentage point in the polls. We serve Britain far better by concentrating on political issues – and often, we have the freedom to take a more creative and brave line than either the Government or the Official Opposition. In the present political climate, that job of being an independent and creative voice in Parliament is our most important duty to the country. Instead, Ming has put forward a motion which he must know to be constitutionally incoherent, for the sake of a few populist points in the opinion polls – points which, if they materialise at all, will have been achieved off the back of public ignorance about Britain’s political system!

I’m sad to say that since Ming became leader, my initial support for him has been sorely tested. I deeply respect him for his principled and honest approach to politics, his expertise on foreign affairs, and his persistence in talking about issues like extraordinary rendition. But the more he continues, the more it seems as if he’s bitten off more than he can chew. When I argue with Labour and Conservative friends, I wish I could tell them that Ming is an excellent leader – but in all honestly, I can’t anymore.

HoodieTV: Local elections in England

Oh dear. This vlog experiment isn't going well, is it? To fail once is excusable, especially when you're ill. To fail twice is certainly pushing it. To fail a third time is unacceptable.

The excuse this time: technical problems. I recorded the vlog, but for some reason the video and the audio are out of sync, and I can't fix it. It also looks as if I'm doing something rather dodgy with my left hand, although I assure you this is merely a cruel trick of the camera! To top it all, I'm out of battery, and I'm out of the will to live, let alone re-record the darn thing.

So here's a transcript of what I would have said:

"Paradoxically, the first thing to become clear from these election results is that there is no clear message for any of the main parties. We’re dealing with a pretty nuanced and complex set of data, and all three parties will be able to spin some positives out of it.

"I'm sure the Conservatives will be celebrating the most. Before this vote, Tory bloggers were saying they’d be happy with 40% projected national vote share, and they’ve exceeded expectations with 41 – in theory, that’s enough for a majority at the next general election. In practice, you can’t just neatly extrapolate general election results from the results for local councils, and the Tories can’t just assume they’re on their way to an easy landslide in a couple of years. Still, they’ve given themselves a very good springboard, and David Cameron’s position can only be more secure now.

"Labour must be relieved to have avoided a total electoral meltdown – but the fact that avoiding a meltdown is seen as an achievement shows how bad things have become. With their leadership still unresolved, it’s hard to place Labour at the moment. It’ll take a few months of Gordon to know where they really stand in public opinion.

"Which brings me onto the Lib Dems, and a worryingly indecisive result. Impressive gains in some places, offset by losses elsewhere. Most upsettingly, we seem to have lost some middle-of-the-road votes to the Tories, whilst picking up disaffected Labour support, in a sort of revolving-door action. At a time when we need to be consolidating, building a core vote, and establishing an identity based on policy and on principles, this doesn’t bode particularly well.

"It isn't a disaster by any means. It certainly isn’t the time for panic, or for drastic and rushed remedies. But over the coming weeks and months, we’re going to have to think long and hard about how to make progress, and how to kick-start the party from here."

Selective quotation

In Prime Minister's Questions today, Tony Blair quoted from the Liberal Democrat document The State They've Put Us In. I'd already read it, but I hardly recognised the words Blair read out. In quotation after quotation, we apparently praised the Government's record in glowing terms, as a horde of Labour backbenchers cheered us on. At the climax Blair said that according to the Lib Dems, he had pursued an "ethical foreign policy".

The problem is that we said no such thing. We said that in 1997, "a Foreign Policy with an ethical dimension was announced", which is true. The rest of the document goes on to demonstrate how that promise was comprehensively broken.

Sometimes, I think we need to be more careful about how we phrase ourselves in leaflets, to avoid being misrepresented, as we were by this (Tory?) flyer:

(I'm sure we actually pledged to use the term "life sentence" only for an actual lifelong sentence, to avoid confusing and upsetting the victims of crime. We surely weren't suggesting that murderers should be let out earlier.)

Still, however carefully we express ourselves, I don't think there's much we can do when the Prime Minister misrepresents us on live TV. Unfortunately, he always gets the last word in PMQs, and if he saves his slapdown till the end, there's no real defence.

HoodieTV: Tories and alcohol

Welcome to HoodieTV, my new series of video blogs. I'll be posting a new episode every Friday afternoon for the next few weeks - if it works well, and has a good response, I'll keep it going as a regular feature.

This week's episode deals with misleading campaigning by the Tories, and the liberal way to tackle alcohol-related crime.

A reply from Ming

Last week, I criticised our handling of the hung Parliament question, and suggested a much more honest and direct approach. In a moment of cheekiness unparalleled in the history of the Lib Dems, I wrote a "speech" for Sir Ming to deliver, to put the whole question to bed. To add the icing on the cheeky cake (which takes some doing), I sent him the link!

Our technologically-savvy leader, or one of his technologically-savvy office staff, has very kindly written me a response, via Facebook. For readers who aren't familiar with this august website, it's a social networking system, originally for students but now open to everyone. Several of our MPs have Facebook profiles, which may well help with campaigning.

So what did the pinstriped radical have to say for himself?

Firstly, he assured me that he wasn't interested in campaigning for a hung Parliament or a coalition, and that he was still focused on maximising our votes and seats. I agree with him, and I'm glad to hear him say so - but it doesn't solve the problem. Whether he intended it or not, his Conference speech has been widely seen as a coalition overture to Labour. However sincerely he means it when he talks about "maximum votes", that line will no longer stop speculation. Not in the way that it did a fortnight ago.

In his reply, Ming quoted a section from his Conference speech, and complained that it hadn't been taken into account by the newspapers in their analysis. It comes just before the infamous five tests:

And now we are faced with the prospect of Gordon Brown as prime minister.

This Chancellor of the Exchequer has had more control over the direction of government policy than any Chancellor in living memory.

This man, who has written the cheques since 1997, has had unparalleled influence within Whitehall. Why on earth should we believe that Britain will be better governed if he moves from No 11 Downing Street to No. 10?

Why should we believe that more of the same is what Britain needs?

As far as it goes, this is all true. But I would direct Sir Ming to Stephen Tall's excellent article on the subject. Stephen points out that Ming "clumsily set out five tests for Labour’s Gordon Brown to prove his prime ministerial worthiness, but scornfully dismissed David Cameron’s Tories in just three words".

Ming may well claim to have provided a balance between courting Brown and criticising his record - but what happened to the correct balance between criticism of Labour, and criticism of the Tories? That's the balance he got wrong, and that's what led to the damaging speculation.

I suspect (and I have no inside knowledge) that Ming is very unimpressed by David Cameron, and intensely dislikes him. But I worry that he lets his personal contempt colour his political judgement. As my favourite fluffy elephant rightly pointed out, instead of writing him off in three words, Ming should have set some tests for Cameron as well:

The true tests for the Conservatories surely should be the SAME, but with ONE MORE: have some policies so that we can TELL whether you have changed or not!

On the one hand, I'm very glad that Ming or his people have got in touch - it does show that they're switched on, and prepared to take in a range of views within the party. At the same time, however, I'm a little concerned that he hasn't understood clearly enough what went wrong, and doesn't have a specific plan as to how to nail the coalition question. For my part, I can only suggest that a more direct approach, and a less "political" one, would do a tremendous amount of good here.

Ming should heed his own words. "More of the same" isn't good enough for Britain, and it isn't good enough for us either.

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I've just blogged three times in a row on exactly the same speech. This can't be healthy! I'd better find something juicy and different to get my teeth into for the next article.

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What do people think of the new, dynamic header at the top of the page? Is it an improvement, and does it spice up the look of the blog? Or is it just a distraction? All comments appreciated. This is still a bit of an experiment ...

How Ming should tackle the hung Parliament question

Until last week, Ming Campbell had a fantastic get-out line whenever he was asked about a hung Parliament. He would say that he was only interested in "maximum votes and maximum seats" for the Liberal Democrats. And that helped to stop our campaigning being derailed by speculation about something which, if it occurs at all, is a good couple of years off.

Conservative blogger Iain Dale believes that, after Harrogategate, the "maximum votes" line will no longer work. Apparently, the Lib Dems are in for a rocky ride during the next few months, and we're going to hear the same question asked ever more loudly. In Iain's view, we need a more convincing answer if we're going to escape without any more harm.

The truth is, we are making a total dog's dinner of the coalition question. There's a much simpler way of doing things; one which will hopefully show the whole question up for the redundant timewaster it really is.

Ming is apparently going to make a speech at the Welsh Conference this weekend. The BBC appears to have the full text in advance. He's going to stress the importance of proportional representation to the party. But if he wanted to undo the damage of last week, and end the speculation about his views on Gordon Brown, he might also say the following:

"A hung Parliament is a very rare event. It last happened in 1974, and then only for eight months. It would be very foolish for a political party to base its strategy on a hung Parliament, and I want to make this very clear: the Lib Dems under my leadership will not be aiming for, or campaigning for, a hung Parliament. We'll keep our feet on the ground, and concentrate on the issues we care about - a fairer, safer society, in a Britain that is both prosperous and environmentally aware. We've put forward radical and innovative policies to bring that about, and that's what I want to talk about.

"But there is still a certain chance of a hung Parliament at the next election. It's not likely, but there's a greater chance now than there has been for a while. Many people have asked me whether the Lib Dems would be more likely to support Labour or the Tories, if we held the balance of power. And although I hate the idea of speculating about something that will probably never happen, I think it's only fair to set out my thoughts.

"The truth is, I can't endorse either Labour or the Tories. I don't believe either of them has the right answers for Britain. They both have their strengths, and I could name quite a few Tory and Labour MPs for whom I have a great deal of respect. But I don't believe either party has what it takes to govern well, which is why the Liberal Democrats stand against Labour and the Tories, and put ourselves forward as an alternative.

"British people deserve a strong Government, and my party has no desire to hold Parliament to ransom. It's probably fair to say that no party can speak for literally everyone, so in a mature, adult democracy, we should be capable of working together for the common good.

"If there were to be a hung Parliament after the next General Election, this is exactly what I would do:

"I would look very closely at the results of the election, and at the national debate. I'd speak to my constituents, and I'd spend time visiting different parts of the UK. I would try my best to build up the best possible image of what British voters want, and what they were trying to say when they voted the way they did.

"And then I would sit down and talk with both David Cameron and with Gordon Brown. I would be open-minded, and go in without any prejudices - but I would always bear in mind the liberal principles and policies of our manifesto. Most of all, I would bear in mind the views and needs of the British people, who deserve a strong and capable Government. I would try my hardest to thrash out a programme of legislation that reflected those needs. If I could achieve that, with either of the other parties, then - and only then - would I agree to enter Government.

"As a Liberal Democrat, I don't believe that politicians should do deals behind closed doors. Mr Brown and Mr Cameron should be under no illusions. If the Lib Dems agreed to a coalition, we would insist on explaining to the public exactly what we had agreed on, and exactly what compromises we'd had to make. We'd also insist on being honest with the public about what the disagreements were, what things we'd agreed to leave on one side until the next election for the sake of stability.

"People in this country can vote Liberal Democrat with confidence. They know that a strong Lib Dem contingent in Parliament will fight for liberal, social and environmental policies, come what may. And they can be certain that in a hung Parliament, we would stick to our principles, we would be faithful to our manifesto, and we would listen to their message. On my watch, if people vote Lib Dem, they know exactly what they're getting."

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Apologies for the speechwriting gimmick. In my defence, I'm not the only one. David Cameron, Tony Blair and Chucky Kennedy have had to suffer "should-have-said" speeches written for them, by bloggers, by pundits, and even by the general public!