David Matthewman

Meme grabbed from sfred and ghoti

( Meme list )

1: A song you like with a colour in the title:

This one took me a while to think of. I toyed with saying 'anything off Chris T-T's 9 Green Songs album', but none of the songs on the album have a colour in the title themselves, so this was clearly cheating.

In the end, I went for Fade to Grey, by Visage. Yes, grey's a colour.



This is just distilled essence of early Eighties, right down to the lyrics being jointly in English and French because why wouldn't you do that. I'm a lot more familiar with the song than with the video, which is a shame because I've just watched it now and the video turns out to be a thing of beauty by Godley & Cream right at the start of their video directing career.

As with any chart song pre-1983, I missed this completely at the time, but when I first heard it in the late eighties, it settled into my brain like dew from a morning mist, and has never really left.

I've decided to add occasional recipes as I cook them here. They're not really recommendations so much as records to myself of what I did, so that I can adapt and improve in future. One result of this is that I will occasionally be overly specific in terms of ingredients and kitchen equipment used; if you are attempting to follow them, there's no need to be so precise.

( Quorn meatball and pepper stew with paprika )

I'm not going to have time to to do much posting during the Lib Dem Party's Spring Conference this weekend in Gateshead, for which many of you will probably breathe a huge sigh of relief. If I weren't busy enough, I'm now potentially going to have to do some reading up on both the Communications Capability Directorate and the Welfare Reform Bill (yes, I've downloaded the Spartacus Report), because I may have to talk intelligently on both of them later this weekend. Eep.

So, any posting is going to have a strict half-hour curfew. Apologies in advance for any terseness and lack of polish as a result (I'm not sure what my usual excuse is, though).

Anyway, later today, Nick Clegg and Tim Farron are going to urge Liberal Democrats to stop apologising and start celebrating. Nick will (I gather) say:

"And now it is time to move on. To stop justifying being in Government and start advertising being in Government. To stop lamenting what might have been and start celebrating what is. To stop defending our decisions and start shouting our achievements from the rooftops."

And Tim's going to point out:

"We got three quarters of our manifesto into Government policy, so I hereby allow you to stop saying sorry for the quarter we didn't get. And if people wanted that missing quarter, well they should have flipping voted for us shouldn’t they?"

I presume that Tim, like me, was brought up on Grange Hill. He's used the word 'flipping' for as long as I've known him - over twenty years - and it's futile to try to get him to stop now.

Both of those have some good points. It frustrates me when people talk as though Lib Dems have achieved nothing in Government, because from our point of view we have achieved a lot; much of it in areas we really care about. Mark Pack has a handy infographics showing Lib Dem achievements in Government here. The graphics may look a little twee - although I personally like them - but the bigger point is that these are things that most Lib Dems really care about.

This often comes as a surprise to people who aren't Lib Dems and who haven't followed the party closely. They (and many of them are my friends and generally clueful politically, so this is less critical than it sounds) tended to assume that with the AV Referendum lost, that was it for the Lib Dems. But that's not the case; you'll notice that the AV Referendum and Electoral Reform isn't even on Mark's list, even though just delivering the referendum was itself a major achievement, even though we lost it (badly). But electoral reform isn't the be-all and end-all of the Lib Dems, and in many other policy areas we've punched well above our weight. In a Government that's over 80% Conservative, the Lib Dems have delivered (and continue to deliver) a far more Liberal programme than could have been expected.

For that, they deserve unqualified credit, and I don't always give it to them.

Where I part company with Tim and Nick is in the idea that we should stop apologising or defending our decisions. Later on, Nick's speech continues:

"So: no more looking back. You can't drive if you’re only looking in the rear-view mirror ... So let's tear off that rear view mirror and look straight ahead. Let's get on with the job that we all came into politics to do. Making this a more liberal nation."

I'm not sure I want to get in a car driven by Nick Clegg. Sure, you can't drive if you're only looking in the rear view mirror, but the thing's there for a reason. It's not: "Cross fingers, signal, manoeuvre." Tearing the mirror off because you don't like the view in it won't stop you getting run over by a lorry, or knocking a motorcyclist into the road. There's a phrase for people who drive with the attitude Nick Clegg is expressing here, and that phrase is 'hit and run driver'. I'm not well disposed to them; one of them broke my arm three years ago as I was cycling home from work. That driver ignored his rear view mirror and focussed on doing whatever job he had ahead of him, too. I was off work for two months, and my hand has never fully recovered.

In our rear view mirror are, among others, the bodies of disabled people left reeling from the impact of the Welfare Reform Act. I don't want to forget them, and leave them lying in the road. I don't think that's a free or fair thing to do; it's not Liberal, it's not British, and it's not acceptable. We need (among the many other things we do) to look back, stop the car, and go back and help those people. Otherwise, we're not responsible drivers, however many other people we deliver to where they want to go.

Taking a voluntary break from LJ/DJ/DW for a while. This is not a result of any one event directly, but is an acknowledgement that I currently simply don't have time/spoons/bandwidth to engage on-line in a consistently constructive or intelligent manner.

I'm randomising my password, so I won't even be able to log-in to reply to comments. Please don't expect me to.

When I was a young Liberal, my friends and I regularly used to do sketches at post-election parties to entertain the troops. Most of these are (mercifully) lost to history, but for some reason I can remember all the lyrics that I wrote to this parody in around 1984. It is sung to the tune of First and Second Law by Flanders and Swann, and is very much of its time, with references to the 'Alliance' and the perceived threat of nuclear war. It came at the end of a longer sketch set in a Conservative committee room for an actual by-election that had made the news at the time where a Conservative loss had resulted in some spectacular and amusing mud-slinging between the agent, his staff, and the candidate.

I don't claim that there's any great craft in the writing, and one or two of the lines test the scansion a little, but it amused sashajwolf when I recited it spontaneously in Liverpool, and I thought it might amuse some of you.
( The First and Second Laws of Voting Dynamics )

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Nick Clegg's statements on tuition fees (and that starts from a fairly high level of frustration with him for singling them out as one of our long-term policies that might have to go in 2009).

Look, the point is not that the Lib Dem manifesto said that we'd phase tuition fees out. Everyone understands that we didn't win the election, so aren't in a position to implement everything in the manifesto. What we compromise about - and whether we compromise at all or just stay out of government - is up for debate, of course, but it's not a betrayal of principles to fail to implement a manifesto commitment if you lose an election.

No, the point is this pledge that Nick Clegg and all other Lib Dem MPs signed back in February. This is what it says:

"I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative."

Here's the problem: nothing in that pledge becomes impossible just because we lost the election. Nick's still an MP, he still gets a vote, and that vote can still be against an increase in tuition fees.

Yes, I understand that Nick Clegg now doesn't want to. I get that he now thinks that the Browne Report offers a progressive fairness premium or something - I'm sorry, I'm losing track of the jargon these days. I also understand that under the terms of the coalition agreement, MPs agreed to abstain at worst on tuition fee rises (that was noted at the time as being a hostage to fortune, but with everything that was going on then, I can genuinely forgive that slip up). But Nick Clegg's not even going to abstain, apparently; he's going to vote in favour.

A pledge, though, is a pledge. It's a serious commitment that should not be lightly broken, and people will be quite reasonably angry with you when you do. Menzies Campbell understands this. Vince Cable appears not to. It might be seen to be OK to break a pledge if unforeseeable circumstances made keeping the pledge impossible, but it's not OK to break it because it's now politically inconvenient.

And it's really not OK to act as though the pledge were a manifesto commitment that the Lib Dems could only stick to if we won a majority government. It was a pledge to vote against a policy, not a pledge to ensure the policy didn't get passed. Nick, Vince and the rest can still vote against the policy and, IMO, should. Alternatively, they can 'fess up to voluntarily going back on the pledge, and plead changed circumstances; it'll still make people angry, but it's better than falsely claiming that being in a coalition now makes the pledge impossible to keep.

And all MPs should probably be a lot more careful about making pledges that they don't really mean. They might get called on them one day.

There's a scene in Babylon Five, in which Vir Cotto finds himself unexpectedly in a lift with G'Kar. Vir Cotto's people, the Centauri, have just launched a devastating attack on G'Kar's people, the Narn, bombing the Narn homeworld from orbit with asteroids in contravention of pretty much every rule of engagement in the B5 universe and killing millions. Vir, who is profoudly unhappy with the actions of his people, attempts to apologise. G'Kar gives a graphic demonstration of why an apology is, at that point, futile.

It's here, if you want to watch it (warning, contains blood, and is probably triggering for self-harm):



As a Lib Dem, trying to write about the spending review and it's effect upon the most vulnerable and least wealthy members of our society, I find myself reminded strongly of Vir. I want to apologise for what I think's going to happen, and for the fact that people who are already struggling to cope are going to need to struggle that bit more, and - unless a miracle happens - some of them are going to be unable to cope. Many of these people are my friends. Some live on the same street as me. (It shouldn't matter if they weren't, of course, but I do suspect that none of them live on the same street as George Osborne, nor Nick Clegg.)

I want to apologise but, really, what use is an apology in this situation? I'll make one anyway, mind you; I'm sorry about what my party (in coalition, yes, but still my party) is doing to welfare. I'm especially sorry as the manifesto contained a far more enlightened attitude both to supporting people who could be helped to find work and to continuing to support those who couldn't. I don't need the apology to be accepted, and I'm aware it may not be, but I'm sorry, and I'll continue to argue both within the party and outside it for the importance of having a strong welfare state. And I'll continue to question my support for the party as a whole.

Because, I'm proud of the welfare state. I'm not, I hasten to add, proud of the fact that we need it, but given that we do need it, I'm proud that it's there. I'm also aware that, as a rule, it sucks to be on welfare. I'm not speaking from direct experience here - although I was claiming JSA for the past six months, I was doing it in the context of a family who could support me anyway, so I don't for a moment think I have a significant personal insight into it - but everything I read from those who are in that situation leads me to think this.

I possibly know the wrong people, but by and large, the people I know who are in receipt of some welfare payments are among the hardest working people I know. Circumstances, one way and another, have put them in a position where they need some help from the state to get by, but they are not lazy, and they are not work-shy, and they have not chosen 'living off the state' as a 'lifestyle'. I don't want that help to be removed; it's one of the last things (yes, even after the sainted BBC) that we should be cutting. Times are going to be tough ahead, and there are going to be more people who need state support to get by, and I don't think there's any excuse for reducing that support at a time when it's going to be most needed.

In fact, I think it's wrongheaded to look at welfare as 'something we can take money from to balance the budget', which from recent speeches seems to be how both Nick Clegg and George Osborne are looking at it. The welfare budget is there to help the vulnerable. Sure, if there are suddenly fewer vulnerable people, or they each need less support, the welfare budget will go down. But to aim to cut the budget without either of those things being true, as we are doing, is to say to the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society 'sorry, but we can't give you as much support as we used to, whether or not you need it'. I simply don't think the country's finances are that dire.

(I realise that I'm treating a complex set of issues as somewhat monolithic here, but I feel I've got the overall picture right. I also realise that this may all look different in the morning, but the spending review, and my Vir-like reaction to it, was keeping me awake, and so I thought I may as well write about it.)

There was a consultative session this morning about 'Strategy' based on this document (clear print or plain text). Essentially, it was a discussion of how the party should proceed now that it's part of a coalition government; particularly how it should continue to make distinct policy, and how that policy should be presented. I managed to miss most of it, although I'm hoping to be able to iPlayer it at some point, because based on accounts from it, and from Ros Scott's summation which I did catch, it sounds very interesting. One point that did come up was that it would be great if we stopped seeing Liberal Democrats in the coalition defending policies the obviously disagreed with.

This point was put to Nick Clegg in the afternoon Q and A session, and he quite reasonably asked us to picture the scene at a press conference where he stood up and said 'here's a new policy, which I'm not particularly happy about'. He has a point. For the sake of good government, there comes a point when everyone needs to at least try to make the policies work, whether you agree with them or not (or break up the government, but I'll assume we're not at that point now). That goes double for economic policy, where part of the point is to convince the international financial community that we know what we're doing. Much as he might like to, I don't expect Danny Alexander to stand up and say: 'Vince and I think this policy's going to push us back in recession, but George Osborne assures us he thinks it'll work *snigger*', and I think it would be even worse for the economy if he did.

All this will come back to haunt us at the 2015 election, though. It's not just that at that point, both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are going to claim credit for everything that went right, and blame the others for everything that didn't, but our 2015 election manifesto is likely to contain a lot of policies that work against much of what we did as part of the coalition. I see that as an inevitable part of governing as a coalition, but I'm not sure the bulk of the electorate will; there's already a perception of the Lib Dems as people who will flip-flop on policy at the drop of a hat, and I don't see that having gone away by 2015. Not that I think we can do anything about it - it's just another in a long list of 'sucks to be us' things about how things worked out after the last election.

...in praising Nick Clegg's speech last night, I should point out that jokes about Eric Pickles being the only Cabinet Minister you can see from space are:

a) unpleasantly sizeist.
b) technologically illiterate. Google Earth easily has the resolution to spot someone Clegg's size.

Most of what I could write here has already been written, so in lieu of financial analysis of the budget I offer you Millennium Dome, Elephant's take on it, and Mark Thompson covers most of the points I wanted to make about whether or not this is a 'betrayal' of Liberal Democrat principles.

This budget was always going to be a problem for Liberal Democrat supporters. People expect the Conservatives to tax the poor and let the rich off, so a budget that largely does the reverse comes as a pleasant surprise, and Lib-Dem-minded people like them for it. Conversely, the Liberal Democrats have always argued that early spending cuts and VAT rises are bad ideas, so when we end up supporting both of those things, it risks making us look hypocritical, indecisive and a bit weak. To people who broadly supported us during the election and liked what we were saying, this budget has had the effect of making us look as thought we've moved away from our position, while the Conservatives have moved towards it. And so they like us a bit less, and the Conservatives a bit more. In the short-term-memory arena of UK politics, that can be fatal. (I'm not saying that it's completely unreasonable; I think the effect is exaggerated, but if you voted for party X because of a particular policy, and then party X gets into government and doesn't implement that policy, you might well re-think your support for that party, depending on the reasons, and on whether there are other parties around that promise the same thing.)

However, that's an inevitable quality of coalition politics. It's not a surprise; I voted for the coalition expecting and accepting it. For the coalition to work, there are going to have to be occasions where Liberal Democrat MPs are going to have to vote for policies they'd vote against if they were solely in charge and, indeed, occasions where Conservative MPs are going to have to vote for policies that they'd vote against if they were solely in charge. With only a fifth of the MPs of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats are probably going to have to do it more often than the Conservatives, and probably more often than we'd like.

That doesn't mean that the Liberal Democrats will have to vote for everything they don't like. Coalition isn't about agreeing on everything, it's about finding a programme that you can both support enough of to make it worthwhile, and which doesn't contain any red-line policies that you can't support. The programme may contain policies that the Liberal Democrats (or Conservatives) pledge to repeal or reverse at the earliest opportunity; it shouldn't contain any that either party is so unhappy with that it won't live with the policies for the next five years. (As a rule of thumb.)

It also doesn't mean I have to be happy when I get an e-mail from Nick Clegg in support of the budget that's weakly-worded, self-congratulatory, and strangely silent on the issue of welfare cuts or the VAT rise. I expect better. I realise that a letter to the membership is effectively public but ... well, we're not stupid. The Lib Dem membership can spot issues that are simply being avoided a mile off, and I think we deserve more respect than that.

There are things in that budget that come close to a red line issue for me; many of the benefit proposals will, inevitably, hit some of the most vulnerable members of our society who are exactly the people that the government should be protecting, and that's simply not something I want us to be doing at all. In a 'three strikes and you're out' view of my support for the coalition, this counts as ... well, less than a whole strike, but more than half of one. I'll be watching very closely to see what happens next. Ultimately, though, like Millennium Dome, I will support the budget with extreme reluctance, and an acknowledgement that my support for it carries responsibility for the damage it does.

Trailers for Channel Four's alternative election night coverage included, at one point, David Mitchell asserting that while most election coverage expressed the results in a series of meaningless statistics, on Channel 4 they were going to express them in terms of the number of people that would be likely to die as a result. As a result of this budget, people are likely to die. The combination of the benefit cuts (especially to housing benefit), the extra test for DLA and the VAT rise will cause a lot of vulnerable people to be financially worse off; if none of those die as a consequence, it will be a minor miracle. The only reason I can support the budget at all is the belief that more vulnerable people would die as a result of a Conservative-only budget, or from the instability that having no viable government at all would bring. That's not a comfortable conclusion; apart from anything else, it may be incorrect.

In conference motion terms, than, what I feel amounts to this:

Conference recognises that the emergency budget of 22 June was a compromise. Conference applauds the Liberal Democrat parliamentary team for implementing many Liberal Democrat policies in the budget, while also regretting that more measures did not make it, and that some that did were implemented less fully than Liberal Democrat policy would have wanted.

Conference deplores the many measures in the budget that go against Liberal Democrat policy. Conference accepts that the presence of those policies in a compromise budget did not cause the parliamentary team to reject the budget as a whole, and Liberal Democrat MPs who voted for the budget should rightly attract no censure for voting for those measures as part of the overall package.

Nonetheless, conference re-affirms its support for Liberal Democrat policy, and urges the Federal Policy Committee to include in any policy statements it makes a commitment to repeal those parts of the budget that go against Liberal Democrat policy.

Furthermore, as a more general point, conference recognises that as part of the coalition, the parliamentary party may be called upon to support measures that go against Liberal Democrat policy. Conference expects the parliamentary party to argue strongly for Liberal Democrat policy, and would not wish the parliamentary party to feel free to ignore all policy, but accepts that not all battles will be won, and that many compromises will be made. It does not believe this view is inconsistent with arguing strongly for all Liberal Democrat policy as a party, and urges all Liberal Democrats to do just that.

I'd vote for that.