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The Parallax Brief Blog

Why Are the Lib Dems Sleepwalking into Irrelevancy?

May 19th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

A couple of days ago, the Parallax Brief blogged that Nick Clegg was walking the Lib Dems into irrelevancy by supporting the 55% super-majority proposal: the number has not been plucked from thin air, or based on any legal, constitutional or moral precedent or logic, but picked specifically because the Lib Dems could only muster 53% of the vote if they wanted to exit the government and bring down, say, a budget.

Lord Falconer agrees, and adds some interesting colour to the Upper House end of this concerning constitutional stitch up:

Before the coalition the Lords, if persuaded that the 55% proposal was the worst sort of constitutional gerrymandering, would have voted the proposal down…

But the chances of the Lords voting the measure down are much reduced with two of the three parties in coalition, making a built-in majority. At the end of last month, there were 704 members of the Lords (excluding those on leave of absence or barred from sitting through holding high judicial office), made up of 211 Labour, 188 Conservative, 72 Lib Dems, 182 crossbenchers, 25 bishops and 26 others.

On almost all issues, because many do not attend regularly and crossbenchers and bishops never vote as a block, the coalition can ensure victory with 180 votes. On a great constitutional issue it would be possible to defeat the coalition only with significant defections. So in the years of the coalition, the house of parliament that has been able to stand up against a whipped Commons will be gravely weakened as a scrutiniser of the executive.

In pursuit of their aim of proportionality in the Lords, the coalition is going to create 100 peers for coalition parties – no doubt selected for their loyalty, and no doubt ensuring that the 55% proposal gets through. These peers will have the effect of ensuring not just that the Lords is weakened as an independent force, but that the hold of the executive on it will be near complete. We will retreat to the late 1950s when the Lords, totally in the hands of the Tories, with the Tory government down the corridor, hardly had a vote from one year to the next.

Nick Clegg’s legislative program, including a great repeal bill, increased protection of civil liberties, the abolition of some of the more ominous Labour programs, like ID cards, and asking members of the public which Acts of Parliament they would like repealed, should be applauded. But he seems intent on moving in the opposite direction when it comes to Parliamentary procedure.

Britain has blurred separation of powers — and even then backed by a constitution that relies on nothing but tradition, good will and precedent. But the strengthening of the executive and centralisation of government authority and power under successive governments from Thatcher to Brown shows what a sham it all is. And the 55% proposal seems to take matters even further: the Commons will be as much in the hands of the whips as ever — which the Parallax Brief suspects is more than at any other point in history — only now the executive could remain in power even without a majority. Meantime, the Lords will be neutered as a scrutinising body, having had extracted its few remaining teeth.

It’s a recipe for one of the most authoritarian, executive-focussed systems in the free world.

Even more bizarrely, the party with the most to loose in this arrangement is the Lib Dems, and both they and the Conservatives campaigned on a platform of taking Parliament from under the jackboot of the executive and making MPs more independent.

What’s happening?


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55% the Road to Lib Dem Serfdom

May 13th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Amid his quiet savaging of the Government’s plan to introduce a 55% threshold for votes of no confidence, Tom Harris, the Labour MP, asks the question,

“But why 55 per cent, you may well ask? Why not 51, or 54 or 58 or 65…? Why not lower than the current threshold? After all, the new government has a majority of about 70. The answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be changed at all. Voters understand what’s fair and what’s not, and they know that if, in any vote in the Commons, one side gets more support than the other – even if only by one vote – then that’s the side that wins.”

That’s true, but the Parallax Brief is pretty certain it’s not the answer to the question. The answer is, of course, a simple case of maths. There are now 344 non-Conservative MPs sitting in Parliament, or 52%. Becoming clear yet? Requiring votes of no confidence to have 55% ayes to carry does what democracy didn’t: gives the Tories a majority on the important votes. Which gets us back to Mr. Harris’s point, that for all the campaign promises of returning freedoms and rolling back state encroachment on liberty, the Conservatives hope one of their very first acts of government will be to pass a law which is frighteningly undemocratic. And the maths exposes the naked expediency of the move: there is no reasoning behind this other than to set the figure just high enough to give the Tories exactly what they need right now.

It’s shabby opportunism like this that makes the Parallax Brief reconsider against his instinctive scepticism the case for a written constitution.

The British system works on goodwill and trust, and in such a system tyranny is never too far away. Especially with the an attitude like this. Voters didn’t give you what you wanted? Fine, just get it anyway through the legislative process. Worry not that this then actually becomes the constitution. Carpe Diem.

Terrifying!

To be fair, the right wing press and blogosphere have cast aside loyalties to attack the proposal. They’re not as incandescent with Hayekian righteousness as they’d have been if this had been proposed by Gordon Brown, but they’ve been swift into battle, and for that should be applauded.

But one group which seems strangely unaware of the affect this will have on it is the Lib Dems. Don’t they see that this vote would allow the Conservatives to render them impotent in the most crucial votes?

Let’s say the Liberal Democrats simply can’t support a George Osborne budget. Perhaps it savages spending on public services and whacks up VAT while cutting inheritance tax and setting aside GBP50 billion or so for Trident. Under the current system, the Lib Dems could bring down the budget and follow it by bringing down the government and letting the People break the deadlock. But with the 55% rule they simply couldn’t. They would need 357 votes, when all they could muster, with Labour, the Nats, and the others combined, is 344.

Checkmate.

Has the Parallax Brief missed something, or is Nick Clegg a rare case of a frog that can’t tell he’s being boiled even when the water is heated incredibly quickly?

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Attacking on Defence Will Do Tories No Good This Time

March 11th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Iain Martin writes in his superb Wall Street Journal blog that David Cameron has blown “up what’s left of the consensus on defence”, and that the Conservatives may well be able to make political capital by attacking Labour’s record on defence — an area in which the Tories have traditionally held the upper hand.

A win for the under fire Tory leader at PMQs in the Commons this week.

[…]

Labour MPs looked incredulous at such a direct attack on ground they have long thought a political no man’s land: defence. This is an issue Labour long ago thought closed down. The government might be accused of being too gung-ho since 9/11, but the old charge of the 1980s of any weakness on defence hasn’t really been applicable. Now, the allegation that the fighting of two wars was underfunded reopens the argument.

It’s often forgotten, but defence – as much as tax and nationalisation – was the issue the Labour modernisers had to neutralise after the party went mad on the subject after the 1979 election. The party had a generation of robust Atlanticists – George Robertson being the most notable – to help it make the shift back and Ernest Bevin’s noble tradition of muscular patriotism to draw on.

Since the mid-1990s, post-Cold War, this has framed Labour policy. And it’s tended to trap the Tories, removing any natural advantage…

But at PMQs Cameron was signalling in clear terms he thinks that the issue of Brown and defence funding in the last decade is so serious… When you consider the public response around the Help for Heroes campaign etc and concern over casualties it could be that Cameron’s on to something.

Or not, as the case probably is.

It is true that the Conservatives have a traditional advantage on defence: on this point, history has proved them right and British (more…)

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Would Cameron Dare the Most Revolutionary Teaching Reform of All?

January 18th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

David Cameron will today unveil his plan to revitalize the teaching profession by making it more elitist — open only to those with good degrees. He will say that his policy is “brazenly elitist — making sure only the top graduates can apply… With our plans, if you want to become a teacher — and get funding for it — you need a 2:2 or higher. And we will also make sure we get some of the best graduates into teaching by offering to pay off their student loan. As long as you’ve got a first or 2:1 in maths or a rigorous science subject from a good university, you can apply.”

That all sounds very interesting, but quite apart from whether Mr Cameron can find enough Maths graduates with a good degree to fill schools’ recruitment needs, an important question must be asked: does it matter?

In fact, Mr Cameron is wasting his time. A degree, or the quality of a degree, is no better at predicting a person’s likelihood of success as a teacher than the colour of that person’s hair.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing for the New Yorker, explains:

A group of researchers — Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress — have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost very district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications — as much as they appear related to teaching prowess — turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a [college] quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans [as a method of assessing his ability to play in the NFL]

Being a good teacher is about more than academic ability or even intelligence. Indeed, many of the skills, the ability to room manage, to grab attention, to maintain discipline, to communicate effectively, and to make students feel involved, aren’t cognitive at all, and are very difficult to instill.

The logical conclusion to this is that, once qualifying basic standards such as a degree of some sort to indicate proficiency in a specific subject, and the ability to talk, it might be as effective to pick at random as it is to select based on academic qualifications.

And given this, there is another, ruthlessly simple, utterly revolutionary way of improving the quality of teachers. Gladwell again:

Financial services firms don’t look for only the best students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No one knows beforehand what makes a high performing financial adviser different from a low performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.

[…]

[Financial services company] North Star Resource Group interviewed about a thousand people, and found forty-nine it liked, a ratio of twenty interviewees to one candidate. Those candidates were put through a four month “training camp,” in which they tried to act like real financial advisers… Of the forty-nine people invited to the training camp, twenty-three made the cut and were hired as apprentice advisers. Then the real sorting began. “Even with the top performers, it really takes three to four years to see whether someone can make it,” [co-president Ed] Deutschlander says. “You’re just scratching the surface at the beginning. Four years from now, I expect to hang on to at least thirty to forty per cent of that twenty-three.”

[…]

In teaching, the implications are… profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

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ConservativeHome: No HealthCare Provision, GBP18 per year Welfare is “Textbook Formula for Economic Success”

November 17th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

ConservativeHome, the right of centre resource website and opinion blog owned by Conservative Party activist Tim Montgomerie, let slip the facade of “progressive conservatism” today, with a blog entry about how simply awesome it would be if we could only combine China’s welfare state with Britain’s lack of corruption. Here’s a choice cut from the story:

The welfare state is very limited: according to the state Xinhua News Agency China plans to spend £25 billion on its safety net in 2009, that is £18 per person. In comparison, the UK spends £164 billion, or £2,645 per person. Before privatisations, state owned companies and agricultural communes often provided cradle-to-grave healthcare, education, pensions, and healthcare. Now 300 million Chinese have no health plan whatsoever, with most others having to foot substantial percentages of every medical bill themselves… It is a textbook formula for economic success.

Astonishing.

But please, the Parallax Brief urges you to follow the link, because there’s more where that came from.

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Congratulations Liz Truss

November 17th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief would like to take this opportunity to offer his heartfelt congratulations to Liz Truss for her victory in her battle against the slobbering puritans of the South West Norfolk Conservative Committe, who had put her through the political ringer of a deselection hearing and vote for no other reason than that she once had an affair with a married man while married herself. She won the vote 137-37.

The SW Norfolk Committe claims it forced the deselection vote because she didn’t reveal in a timely manner that she had had the affair, rather than for the affair itself, but given the fact the affair was common knowledge in political circles, and available knowledge to anyone with the wherewithal to Google “Lyn Truss”, the Parallax Brief has his doubts.

He wonders, for instance, how many of the dribbling prigs adored Alan Clark while piously judging Ms. Truss?

Anyway, it’s time to forget all that and move on.

Ms. Truss will make an excellent MP, adding to the intellectual vigour of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, and if there is a positive for the Conservative Party to draw from this whole farce it’s that she has the toughness necessary to succeed.

Well done her.

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Spectator Defends Government Spending, Says Civil Servants are Efficient and Necessary

November 16th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

It’s amazing how much money that so-called fiscal conservatives are willing to lavish on the armed services. The Parallax Brief believes our armed forces are grossly underfunded and overstretched for Britain’s current foreign policy brief, but what always shocks him is the willingness of those who spend the vast majority of their time engaged in a monotonous, aggressive siege of what they see government largesse (that is, all government spending) to not only join him in being against military cutbacks, but to argue that any it’s wrong to even question MoD spending.

Here, for instance, is the Spectator’s Daniel Korski who — and perhaps sit down now, because you might faint when you read what follows — criticised on Sunday on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog Liam Fox for wanting to reduce the size of the MoD’s civilian (civil servant) contingent.

“Liam Fox has made clear that the Conservative Party is planning to slash the number of civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence as a way of balancing the military budget if they win the general election in 2010. “We have 99,000 people in the Army and 85,000 civilians in the MoD. Some things will have to change – and believe me, they will,” Fox has said.

[But]…MoD civilians include “doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, lecturers, policemen, security guards, Royal Fleet auxiliary sailors, intelligence analysts”. Many of these people would be considered essential frontline servabts if they worked elsewhere in government. Seeing them as bonus-craving, army-destroying time-wasters is wrong.

In fact, if the MoD axed its entire civilian workforce it would save no more than 2.7 billion pounds in pay pensions and other costs. By comparison, armed forces’ costs amount to 8.9 billion pounds.

While the MoD is clearly in need of reform, and the public can be counted to react in a pavlovian way to the juxtaposition of the number of civilian employees and military personnel, this is hardly the zero-sum issue it is made out to be. Nor is it a major strategic concern for UK defence.

The Parallax Brief was still in the process of preparing a stiff brandy to soften the shock of reading a Spectator journalist defending slothful, incompetent civil servants who could never find work in the private sector, when he read Spectator deputy editor James Forsyth on Obama’s Afghanistan dilemma.

“A report in the New York Times today suggests that the administration is now worried about the cost of sending more troops. The paper says that Obama is insisting that every option contains a quick exit strategy as part of an effort to keep costs down. When you consider the likely cost of many of Obama’s domestic priorities, especially health-care, it seems remarkable that he is so concerned about the costs of the Afghan mission.”

Let’s get this straight, then: The Spectator is now for government spending, and civil servants, who are now underpaid and overstretched, and against government carefully analysing costs against benefits?

If the Spectator was genuinely fiscally conservative, then there would be blog entries on the Coffee House supporting the decision to cut back on the MoD’s civilian contingent and Obama’s concerns about the cost of war.

By the Spectator’s own numbers, cutting even 5% of the civil servants working at the MoD would save GBP135,000,000. Given that there are currently 23,000 civil servants working for the MoD’s procurement wing, a staggering three times more than were needed for the job during the second world war, are cutbacks really unwarranted?

Is there any other department of state which can count on the Spectator’s support in this way?

The Parallax Brief suggests that if, say, Andrew Lansley said GBP135 mn could be saved by trimming civil servants and managers working in the NHS, those defending NHS bureaucracy would be ridiculed by the Spectator.

And would Obama be criticised by the Spectator for considering the cost-benefit dynamic of a new extension of education policy?

A question, then: Are James Forsyth, Daniel Korski and the Spectator true fiscal conservatives who genuinely want government spending to be lowered and government to be more efficient, or do they just want spending on services that help poor people to be slashed so rich people can keep most of their money?

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Benefit Addiction and Inequality

November 14th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Benedict Brogan, in his Telegraph blog, offered a withering assessment of the Glasgow North East Labour victory

But the result is terrible for Scotland, and Glasgow. A constituency that achieves such terrible scores on all the social indices turns once again to Labour despite its dismal record on poverty and inequality. It reminds us how much work the Tories have to do to persuade to give up their addiction to welfare. It is a glaring example of how successfully Gordon Brown has rigged the political system in his and Labour’s favour by extending the client state. Shaking off its dependency on the public subsidy pipeline built by Mr Brown is the biggest challenge facing Scotland, and Glasgow North East illustrates how far it still has to go.

Hopi Sen (real name), a former Labour Party head of campaigns, thinks that “Benedict Brogan is a twit“, and offers the following justification for that charmingly forthright statement:

Well Ben, I don’t think there are many people who’ll benefit from inheritance tax cuts in Glasgow North East, but there are plenty who’d suffer if there was less nursery provision. Some people call this “dependency on the client state”. I call it Government working to make life better for families.

If you live in a poorer area, the money Labour governments spend on schools, on policing, on child care, on sure start and on tax credits make a big difference for you.

[...]

If Ben really wants to know why people in poorer areas think it’s in their interest to vote Labour and people in richer areas think it’s in their interest to vote Conservative he could do worse than start with this chart from the IFS.

[...]

The IFS research suggests that those on benefits alone are not hugely better off under Labour*. Rather, it is the relatively low income workers, the shop assistants, the cleaners, the part-time time nursery nurse, the office assistants and the manual workers who have done better in terms of income.

On top of this, it is groups like this that benefit most from schools that have had more money spent on them, medical provision that has improved, more access to nurseries and so on.

The Parallax Brief thinks that this is right, to a certain degree. The problem with benefits is that certain members of society decide that they would rather claim the benefits than take low paid work, draining public money, reducing the workforce and diminishing the incentive to work. The Parallax Brief — and probably most of you — has anecdotal evidence that this is sometimes the case.

But it’s important to remember why aid like unemployment and incapacity benefit were first introduced: the idea that a fair, meritocratic society would not consign to squalor hardworking citizens who through no fault of their own became unable to support themselves or their families. Unfortunately, because it doesn’t really make interesting news, we never get to hear about the genuine claimants, who still account for the vast majority of benefit claimants, and who genuinely require help.

It’s true, therefore, that more could be done to restructure the way benefits are delivered to both support and encourage work, but the Parallax Brief has always suspected that those on the right who trot out phrases like “benefits trap” and “benefit dependent” don’t want to restructure or improve, but remove: Freeing people from benefits dependency by drastically reducing or completely taking awa the benefits available.

Another way to think about Brogan’s argument is this: sure, Labour might not have solved many of the social issues in Glasgow, and poverty certainly exists, but would it be better under the Conservatives?

Perhaps Labour should be punished, but that doesn’t mean the Conservatives should be rewarded.

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Tory EuroFissure: Hague’s “Business as Usual” Approach to EU Asking for Trouble

November 9th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that his party would not immediately take on the EU to repatriate the powers to the British Parliament demanded by Conservative policy, according to the Telegraph yesterday.

“After abandoning plans to hold a referendum on Europe, following last week’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Hague said the Tories accepted that constitutional reform would not be on the EU agenda for some years.

And while the party remained Euro-sceptic, a Conservative Government would not get into a “bust-up” over its new policy of seeking to negotiate opt-outs in a number of areas of European policy and pass a sovereignty bill to stop further powers being repatriated for some time to come.

Until then, he agreed that it would effectively be “business as usual” for Britain within Europe under the Tories.”

It’s clear to the Parallax Brief that David Cameron and his team do not want to divert their energies away from the main task at hand if and when they gain power: fixing the economy and Britain’s parlous public finances. It’s equally clear, however, that this isn’t going to satisfy the party base.

Sure enough, ConservativeHome was all over the story, furious at the suggestion.

“…he should not, not be suggesting, unless he wants to generate a massive split in the party, is that the policy is to be a low priority, something not all that important in a world of deficits to cut and wars to fight, something we might or might not get around to one day if we’ve nothing better to do. As I have argued here, Cameron’s hierarchy are mistaken if they believe that the route to an easy life is by doing little on Europe, and equally mistaken if they believe that addressing the Party’s overwhelming (and country’s heavy majority) concerns over Europe would use up political capital rather than create it for other priorities such as public spending cuts, the broken society, and education reform.”

Fighting talk?

Probably not. The Parallax Brief has come to the conclusion that Conservatives on both sides to the Europe divide will fume in private but bite their tongues until the election. They must know, as the Parallax Brief suggests, that the only thing that can stop the Tory Party winning the election is the Tory Party.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t storing up trouble for the future.

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Tory EuroFissure: French Government Lashes Out at “Autistic” Tory EU Plans

November 5th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

If there was any reason to doubt the egregiousness of the euroscpetic view that the major repatriation of powers, or even the post-facto nullification of the Lisbon Treaty if a referendum returned a no vote, would not lead to the mother of all diplomatic rows with Europe, last night should have dispelled any doubts, as the French government lashed out at the mere prospect of such steps.

According to the Guardian, France’s Europe minister, Pierre Lellouche, accused the Conservative Party of “castrating” Britain’s position within the EU by adopting an “autistic” approach to European relations and policy.

“It’s pathetic. It’s just very sad to see Britain, so important in Europe, just cutting itself out from the rest and disappearing from the radar map …. This is a culture of opposition … It is the result of a long period of opposition. I know they will come back, but I hope the trip will be short.”

“They are doing what they have done in the European parliament. They have essentially castrated your UK influence in the European parliament.”

The Guardian also reports that Lellouche said he has told Hague personally that his position was a “waste of time for all of us”.

The Parallax Brief is particularly interested in this point, as it provides some indication of just how difficult any negotiations with the EU will be for William Hague and David Cameron. How much compromise will Britain have to make? What will it have to give in return? And, most important, what compromise will his own party members, for many of whom all-out diplomatic war with the EU, far from being something to avoid, would likely be welcomed as an opportunity to reset Britain’s position in Europe altogether.

The Parallax Brief asks the question again: Can Cameron offer the Eurosceptic wing of his party enough red meat to satiate their appetite for a major recalibration of Britain’s EU relations without boxing himself into a corner where a major blow up with our EU partners becomes inevitable?

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