David Cameron – Page 4 – thinking liberal

What is the core Liberal Democrat identity?

One thing that most people who take an interest in the Liberal Democrats agree on is that the party needs to develop a clearer identity and, to use the popular marketing speak, a clear “brand”. This has characterised much of the coverage of the conference, such as this from the Economist, showing not a particularly good understanding of the party, and this from Michael Meadowcroft, who has an excellent understanding, but does less well in explaining what the party actually needs to do. Unfortunately these articles are all too characteristic of the debate. On the one side outsiders, including recently recruited party staffers, who simply assume the whole thing is about deciding on a politically convenient position and then moving the party to it, and on the other by insiders who fail to articulate exactly what they mean by the clear liberal (or Liberal) principles they want the party to espouse. Let me try to pick a way through.

First: does the party really need to worry about this? Just because all the pundits agree doesn’t make it true. The answer is yes. There are two problems with the party’s current standing, or lack of it. The first is that it struggles with a “core vote” strategy. This is particularly important for elections fought under proportional representation. The ones we fought in London earlier this year were a disaster; party campaigning was directed to floating voters who had long since floated away, and bringing out the vote people who supported the party in other elections for largely tactical or local reasons, and who large did not vote for it on this mandate. Contrast this with Greens, who for much less money and effort got out a similar vote based purely on setting out who they were and what they stood for. This matters because a disaster beckons for the party in the 2014 Euro elections, fought under PR, unless this changes.

The second reason is that there is the perpetual danger of policy confusion. This has been clearly on display in the debate on NHS policy. Do we want to follow the Liberal idea of a service with strong accountability to local communities, but flexibility on who actually delivers it? Or do we want a Social Democratic service which is pretty much the same throughout the country, provided by a single organisation? With the help of Lib Dem ministers, the government started off with something that looked a bit like the former, only for activists to reject it for the latter. This confusion matters when you are an aspiring party of government rather than one simply of protest and opposition, and a party of government is what the party aspires to be.

But a word of warning: you can overdo the clear identity. Successful political parties are coalitions, combining both a sense of common identity and a high spectrum of disagreement. The Conservatives, for example, identify with the rich and those who aspire to be rich: but this brings together social conservatives with those who just want to cut taxes.

It is instructive to consider the two attempts to rebrand political parties that have shaped British politics in the last couple of decades. The first was Tony Blair’s New Labour project, and the second David Cameron’s attempt to de-toxify the Conservative brand. Both involved challenging some deeply held beliefs, and have left a deep sense of betrayal in their parties. In Mr Blair’s case the effort has not been unsuccessful. The party won three elections and even in opposition is cohering much better that the Conservatives have in a similar position. I think that is for two reasons, one intended by Mr Blair, and the other not. The intentional part was the illiberal, strong government aspect, clamping down on civil liberties. This has played well with the working class communities that are the core of the party’s identity – and has also helped forge bonds with paternalistic ethnic minority communities. When Mr Blair assiduously wooed liberals in the 1990s, he never really meant it. The unintentional part of Labour’s rebranding is its identification with public sector workers, expanding their numbers and protecting their interests. A modern economy requires a large state, and appealing to these workers is a powerful political strategy – but one that Mr Blair tried to resist, unlike his successors Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

The Conservative rebranding, five years or so on, looks a lot less happy. What quickens the pulse of most young Tory activists seems to be an entirely different agenda from Mr Cameron’s, reminiscent of US Republicans: lower taxes, smaller state, escape from the EU, climate change scepticism and an outmoded idea of “competitiveness”. While some of this chimes with public sentiments at large, as a package it it is not a winner. Combine that with an electoral system that is tilted against them, and the project is likely to be a failure. The Coalition with the Lib Dems, as Mr Cameron clearly saw, was an opportunity to consolidate this rebranding, but the price stuck in the throat of his party and he was unable to follow through. The lesson there is don’t try to take a party to a place that it will not stay.

So what of the Lib Dems? Firstly the party needs a core identity which is able to withstand a large diversity of views. This is both easy, and tricky. The easy bit is that the party stands for openness, freedom for individuals to choose the life they want, all underpinned by a sense of social responsibility and compassion. All Lib Dems, pretty much, will identify with this, and they will think that the other parties do not. The first difficulty is that this identity is an anti-identity: an identity that rejects, or downplays, the usual identities of class, nationality and race. That is a difficult trick to pull off. The second difficulty is that each of the other main parties (and the Greens for that matter) will think that such nice and inoffensive people can be appropriated into their own coalitions with a few warm words. And indeed, many people with these values work for these other parties. It is not quite enough.

But it has two important advantages. First is that it is a natural second choice: not the most liked position, but not the most hated either. Second is that the forces of history are with it. The old identities of social class, nationality and the rest are gradually being eroded – and to the extent that the other parties lean on them, it makes them unattractive.

This is enough for one post. What will count is not this sort of abstract speculation, but the practical steps that follow from them to create a successful political movement. That, I will return to.

The curious case of Heathrow’s third runway

Why did senior Tory MP Tim Yeo make such a conspicuous bid to support Heathrow’s third runway? The idea is ruled out in the Coalition Agreement, and it is politically impossible for the government to take forward. Such a bid can only weaken the government and David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister. Rather than indulge in conspiracy theories, I prefer to think it is because most MPs, who are elected in safe seats, and the business lobby advisers, don’t understand how elections are won and lost.

Mr Yeo made his bid in an article in the Telegragh. After going through the familar arguments put forward by lobbyists, he appealled to Mr Cameron to change the government’s stance, by asking himself “whether he is a man or a mouse”. The change could be a turning point for the government, he said, giving it a sense of mission amidst a lacklustre economy.

Heathrow’s operator, BAA, and principal user, British Airways, have been campaigning for Heathrrow’s expansion for many years, trench by trench. It seemed that they had lost this latest bid when the Coalition was formed in 2010. But they didn’t give up, and have kept their lobby efforts going. The results are quite impressive. Grudgingly, general public opinion seems to be coming their way, amid a deluge of supportive newspaper stories. It has become a totem issue for the political right, desperate for ideas that will both expand the economy and keep public expenditure down. Mr Yeo is one of a series of Tory MPs that have publically come out in favour.

But scepticism runs very deep here in west and southwest London, where we endure continuous intrusion from air traffic. Each victory won by BAA (to date mainly over new terminal buildings) has been bitterly contested. We have seen the smooth reassurances offered in one bid quietly buried in the next. There is no trust left in BAA and BA. And amid the swathe of hotly contested marginal constituencies in the airport’s shadow, the importance of the issue has only risen. This is what forced the Conservatives to oppose the new runway before the 2010 election. The area is also a stronghold for the Liberal Democrats, who have picked up on local opposition to Heathrow expansion from the start.

It is this last that is the political key for the government. Liberal Democrats are a beleaguered species since they joined the Coalition. Hopes that being in government would add to the party’s credibility are fading fast, as local election results show a grim picture. A very difficult election is coming up. Here the party’s objectives will be to hang on to what they have as best they can. Those local lection results show that the party can still benefit from an incumbency effect. South west London is one of the key battlegrounds, with four Lib Dem seats to defend, and a fifth Tory seat, Richmond Park, a marginal that the Lib Dems could win back. The party simply cannot afford to support Heathrow expansion. What’s more, the evident Tory backsliding on the issue is one of the very few shafts of light for Lib Dem campaigners locally. If the Tories drop their opposition to it in their next manifesto they will be bring out the champagne in Lib Dem HQ.

Which makes the fact that Mr Yeo and others are upping the ante very curious. This is an existential issue for the Lib Dems, so they will veto any change of government policy – never mind that the Tory Transport Secretary Justine Greening also has a seat under the Heathrow flightpath and has campaigned vigorously locally against expansion. Politics is supposed to be about the art of the possible.

What might the explanation be? One popular theory is that it is about Mr Cameron’s leadership of the Tory party. The Tory right are fed up with him, and would like him to be replaced. But to do it like this is surely suicidal – we only have to see what happened to John Major, the last Tory Prime Minister, who also had to deal with backbench discontent. The result was 13 years of uninterrupted Labour rule.

It may simply be a long term plan to ensure that Heathrow expansion goes ahead. This is surely what BAA and their advisers have in mind. If they can get the Tory party to change its mind at the top, and the Tories win the election without a few of those London seats, then bingo! They had already persuaded the last Labour government to press ahead. But this is a herding cats strategy. If they persuade the Tories to change their mind, the chances are that Labour will come out against, so that they can win back a few of those marginals in south and west London. The result of the that election could be very tight, so you don’t just wish away a few seats here and there for the sake of a project like this.

Personally I think it is naivity. Some on the Tory benches have spotted that if the Conservative backbenchers are behind a government policy, and you add in the Lib Dem payroll vote, who are bound to support any Coalition compromise, then it is enough for legislation to pass, even if all the Lib Dem backbenchers rebel. So all you have to do is ram a policy past the top Coalition policy process, and you’ve won. This strategy worked for George Osborne when he wanted to reduce the top rate of income tax – which he did in this year’s Budget in exchange for a series of policy concessions, now long since forgotten. He had similarly been told this was politically impossible. This is reinforced by the belief that the Lib Dems will not bring the show down because they are afraid of an election.

But that ended badly. Mr Osborne’s Budget, including reducing the top rate of tax, is now seen as a politcal distaster. It did nothing to boost investment and growth, as the Tory rhetoric and “Business” claimed it would. And as the next election looms Lib Dems are increasingly focusing on how to hold onto their parliamentary seats. It’s one reason why they jumped at the chance that Tory backsliding on Lords reform gave them to ditch the new constituency boundaries – which they had come to realise would make things very difficult for them. Heathrow is a similar existential issue, worth leaving the government for. No less than two Lib Dem cabinet members have seats near the airport.

But Mr Yeo, like most Tory and Labour MPs, represents a safe seat. He seems to have little comprehension on how elections in marginal seats work. The same seems to be true of BAA and their advisers, who probably like to look at national opinion polls and the big picture. Surprisingly few of the community of advisers, lobbyists and polical professionals that inhabit Westminster have a good understanding of the graft needed to win real elections; even less have any comprehension of how Lib Dem MPs win and hold their seats. So they make silly mistakes like this.

And what of the the case for expanding Heathrow? This deserves a blog in its own right. The case is stronger that my instinctive distrust of BAA, BA and anything calling itself a “business case”, or any group purporting to represent “Business”, would normally allow. But that is irrelevant in the rough and tumble of winning marginal votes.

Lords reform: the real loser is David Cameron’s project

Today Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, announced that Britain’s Coalition government would end its attempt to make the country’s upper house, The House of Lords, mostly elected. It is a bitter blow for Lib Dems, but not unexpected. What does this say about the state of British politics?

The problem was that the plans did not command sufficient support on the Conservative benches. There were 90 or so rebels at an earlier vote, and this is enough to kill the bill if Labour oppose it. Labour had supported the reforms in principle, but said that, as a constitutional measure, it needed more time for debate in the Commons, so opposed the critical timetable motion. This argument is entirely specious. Debate on the floor of the Commons is an exercise in farce; it has to be time-limited or else it degenerates into filibuster. The cynicism of Labour’s position is made plain by the fact that they would not be drawn on the amount of time they thought the bill actually needed. But there was in any case a more substantive argument from the Labour side: in their manifesto they had said that reform should be made subject to a referendum, which the government side did not want to do. We can argue about the logic of Labour’s position on the referendum, but a manifesto is a manifesto.

So Mr Clegg was quite right to abandon his attempt at reform. There was very little credit in the wider world to be had for a fight to the death on this issue. While the public is broadly sympathetic to the idea, they don’t care very much about it. Mos readily agree to the trump card argument of British constitutional conservatives: that there are more important things to be doing.

Just about the only way of getting the reform through would have been to accept a referendum. Although the current polls are favourable, it would be a difficult referendum to win – a bit like Australia becoming a republic. Australians favour a republic in principle, but the never the particular structure of republic that is on offer. It was easy to pick holes in the specifics of the proposals – but that would be true of any proposal born of attempts to create consensus. The risk/reward ratio just didn’t stack.

Lib Dems are very bitter, since they see this as a breach of faith, as Andrew Rawnsley has explained in the Observer. They have knuckled down to vote for a number of proposals that they really hated, such as tuition fees for universities (though to be fair some high-up Lib Dems secretly liked the idea), and elected police commissioners, as well as immigration limits. Of course Tories have voted for Lib Dem policies too, but these are mostly quite popular in the country at large, such as raising tax thresholds. Although the Tories let them have a referendum on AV, their campaign to oppose this modest and sensible reform was so vitriolic and irrational as to come over as a breach of faith, especially when they attacked Mr Clegg personally on the basis that you couldn’t trust him because he entered into coalition with them!

But the public indifference left Mr Clegg with a problem. Why bring the government down over this, and not tuition fees, or many other things which are currently unpopular with the public at large? So the breach is not enough to end the Coalition. Instead Mr Clegg has decided to withdraw the party’s support to boundary changes to Westminster constituencies. This reform would equalise their size, to the benefit, so the conventional wisdom goes, of the Tories.

Here it is Mr Clegg’s turn to be politically calculating. I have heard his supporters make the argument that since there will be no elected upper chamber, we need to retain a bigger Commons – an argument that I struggle to understand. To be fair Mr Clegg does not use this argument in his email to members – where it comes over as a more straightforward tit-for-tat. The Tory sophists argue that the Coalition agreement did not actually say that they would vote for the Lords reforms – just to bring forward proposals. But the same can be said of the boundary changes.

And as things have turned out, the boundary changes are a real problem for the Lib Dems. In ordinary times they would have been much more relaxed, as they have shown an ability to move out of their strongholds in held seats to win over adjacent areas. The London MP Sarah Teather won her seat in 2010 in spite of major changes to the boundaries. But the Lib Dem activist base has suffered with the coalition, and the campaigning environment is much tougher. They have shown an ability to hold on where the party and its candidates are locally well know, but not elsewhere. There are no reserves with which to flood new areas. The boundary changes are a major headache. Neither are the changes partilcualry popular amongst the general public, whatever the intellectual case. To get equally sized seats they have run roughshod over traditional local sensibilities. In Wales the impact is particularly severe. Even may Tory MPs will be relieved if the reforms died a death.

But it will create an awkward moment in 2013 when the vote is due to take place, unless the proposal is abandoned. To defeat the changes Lib Dem government ministers would have to vote against or abstain – this would be new territory for the government and could easily bring it down.

So who gains from this sorry saga? The first winners are Labour, where their cynical manoeuvring have bought rich rewards. First they have made the Coalition look weak and incompetent. But best of all they should now be able to defeat the boundary changes, which they hate. Ed Milliband’s leadership can chalk up another success after his inauspicious start.

The second winners are the grumpy Tory backbenchers. They genuinely hated the Lords reform, and will be glad to kill it. They are also pretty relaxed about idea of the coalition failing. And as individuals the defeat of the boundary changes makes their lives easier.

For the Lib Dems the outcome is mixed. It’s a policy failure but it is very clear who is to blame: the Tory backbenchers and the scheming Labour politicians – unlike the AV referendum. This fiasco is out of the way a long time before the next election is due – and defeating the boundary changes will give their campaigners the best possible chance of hanging on to the 40-50 seats needed for the party to survive as a political force.

The big loser is the Tory leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, and his project of turning his party into a credible one of government. For all the soft soap he puts into the Party’s manifesto, it is clear that he can’t carry his party with him. He took on his backbenchers and came out second. His party can unite around a right-wing Eurosceptic platform, but winning a General Election, especially on the old boundaries, looks impossible. A centrist Tory manifesto will not be credible. His plan to use the coalition with the Lib Dems to de-toxifiy the Tory brand has come completely unstuck.

And the country remains stuck with an antiquated system of government that increasingly loses the respect of both the public and the world at large. The public is paying a big price for its indifference.

Murchoch and BSkyB: Hunt isn’t the issue. It’s Cameron

The Culture Secretary is in a tight political spot. He showed overt political support for Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire, and especially its attempt to consolidate its hold in the highly successful British satellite broadcasting business BSkyB. Today was supposed to be his moment of truth, in front of the Leveson inquiry. There is much speculation that he will be forced to resign. That may be so, but based on today’s evidence I don’t think he’s the main culprit in a shabby episode.

The story so far. Back in 2010 Murdoch launched his bid on BSkyB, which his empire controlled but did not fully own. Because of its wider implications this was referred to the government, which was required to act in a quasi-judicial capacity – that it acts with the same impartiality and fairness of process as a court of law. The minister given responsibility for this was the Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable. But Dr Cable (as he likes to be known) made some rather rash comments about the Murdoch empire to undercover reporters working for the Daily Telegraph (which ironically opposed the bid). As soon as these became public, Murdoch objected that he did not have the necessary degree of impartiality for a quasi-judicial role. Within hours the job was given to Mr Hunt instead.

But Mr Hunt, it now turns out, was the subject of intense lobbying by the Murdochs (mostly via their respective minions), and had been lobbying the Prime Minister, David Cameron, in their support. The awkward issue is that if Dr Cable was unfit for the job because he was biased one way, then Mr Hunt was equally unfit because he was unbiased the other way. As the closeness of the relationship between Mr Hunt and the Murdoch empire became clear, there were calls on him to resign. These were strong enough for his special adviser, Adam Smith, to fall on his sword.

The logic of this is that Mr Hunt should have refused the job. But the nature of his relationship with the Murdochs, and his views of the bid, were certainly known to Mr Cameron. Surely the bigger problem was the Mr Cameron appointed him to do the job in the first place. The communications between Mr Hunt and Downing Street (actually with George Osborne rather than the PM directly) seem to show this.

Mr Hunt’s defence is that once he got the job, he created a robust decision-making process that transcended his prior inclinations – and that the decisions he did make showed no bias (before the bid was overwhelmed by the phone hacking scandal that engulfed the Murdoch empire). The trouble is that exactly the same defence is available to Dr Cable, who was much more scrupulous about showing distance. Indeed I suspect that Dr Cable would have been driven to approve the bid since the main objections to bid did not form a substantial barrier legally. To Dr Cable passing this particular baton over was a silver lining to the very dark cloud that this embarrassing affair comprised.

It was Mr Cameron that acted inappropriately. If he accepts Mr Hunt’s defence, he should not have stripped Dr Cable of the job, and made the same defence of him. If he was worried about open bias, he should have found somebody other than Mr Hunt to replace him – and that is what he should have done.

That won’t help Mr Hunt. Just as Adam Smith’s resignation was meant to protect his master, Mr Hunt may need to take the rap for his boss. The whole Murdoch episode is toxic to Mr Cameron. He badly needs to make it go away.

The Coalition – there’s a narrative, but the right doesn’t like it. Time for Lib Dems to make the case.

Since the budget in March, the British Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition government has been having a rough ride in the media. This is showing up in its poll ratings, with Labour romping ahead. Mostly this is Westminster bubble nonsense, but Liberal Democrats, in particular, need to ponder what is happening – and do more to lift the government’s PR performance.

The list of issues that the government is said to have handled badly grows. It started with taxing pensioners, takeaway food, and charitable donations, which arose from the Budget. This week the issues have been queues at Immigration at airports, poor GDP figures for the British economy, and revelations that the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was a bit to close to Rupert Murdoch’s News International media group.

Mostly these are either non-stories stoked up by the opposition, or quite sensible policy decisions that are attracting opposition from vested interests. The Jeremy Hunt problem is the only one that looks a bit more serious, but it is part of a much more complex story that sits rather outside the government’s main purpose. The GDP figures do relate to an important issue, the economy, but were of little significance in their own right, and told us nothing that was actually new.

So why can’t the Government get on the front foot and just swat this stuff away? There is some nostalgia for “big hitter” government spokesmen that previous governments have been able to trot out to do just that: Labour’s John Reid, or the Conservatives’ Ken Clarke (in another era – he’s older and off-message now). There was a rather interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning on this, featuring Mr Reid and Norman Tebbit, who has also performed such a role. These spokesmen blamed the government’s lack of narrative. Lord Tebbit scoffed at Lords Reform and gay marriage as ideas too small to make a compelling story. Both added that the fact that the government is a coalition made this very difficult. These creatures of the old politics would say that of course, but it’s worth trying to tackle the argument rather than the man on this one.

First there’s the rather complacent point that all governments suffer from mid-term blues, and can get bogged with apparently trivial news issues at round about this time. It’s not clear that the big hitters helped much this. Things get better in the natural cycle.

Secondly the lack of a clear narrative is hardly new either. Mrs Thatcher was clear enough – though that did not stop very poor mid-term poll ratings. And as for John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown – none of these governments had a clear mission, beyond being competent managers. Mr Major was lampooned for his “cones hotline” as being his biggest idea – beside which gay marriage and House of Lords are clearly a big deal. But Mr Blair’s main thrust in the 1990s boiled down to “the same, only different”. He was elected in 1997 with a huge majority and little mandate beyond introducing devolution in Scotland and Wales, ideas that were evidently forced on him from outside. Mr Brown’s lack of clear narrative is the stuff of legend. This is what modern managerial politics has become.

But actually there IS a perfectly good narrative, if only you look for it. First is the economy: Labour left a horrible mess, which went beyond trashed government finances to a highly unbalanced economy. The Labour economy was built on massively unsustainable levels of government expenditure, both for services and benefits. Painful though this is, they have to be cut back, and there’s never a good time to do that. But it wasn’t just the government being too big, there were too many of the wrong sorts of services, and not enough things we can export. All this means that you can’t just stimulate the economy back to growth – because as soon as the stimulus ends the economy sinks back to where it was before, with even more debt. This is a long haul – let’s be thankful that unemployment is at lower levels than in earlier recessions. What is really needed to get us moving is more investment by business – but that’s difficult in the current world climate. Now just what is it in the message “this is a long haul” that do you not understand when carping about 0.2% in GDP figures that are going to be revised in a month or so’s time?

But the narrative has to go further – Lord Tebbit conceded that there was a reasonably clear narrative on the economy. And this is the Big Society/Localism/Community Politics agenda. We need to make central government smaller so that people can be empowered locally to change things to the way they want them. That means reforming the whole shape of government – including the NHS. We’ve been so addicted to the old centralist ways that it is bound to take time for these things to work themselves out and there will a lot of protest on the way. And finally we need to clean up politics. This involves tightening up the electoral system (equal constituencies) and reducing the number of MPs. It means tackling that out of control and ineffective patronage factory called the House of Lords. Of course people are squealing. There are no omelettes without broken eggs.

I could go on to bring in Europe (not the time for radical changes in the UK relationship with the economy so delicate), and immigration (this is something most of the electorate agreed on at the last election and the Lib Dems promised to grit their teeth). This narrative is surely no worse that Tony Blair’s government that got re-elected twice.

The first problem is that the government is not clearly articulating this narrative. They are doing quite well on the economy, though could do better. But not the bigger picture. The problem is lack of narrative itself, it is that the Tory right, and their friends in the press, don’t like it.

Of course there are tensions in the government – between parties and within them. But that’s not new. Mrs Thatcher had her “wets” on the Tory left. Mr Blair had both the Labour left, who felt utterly betrayed, and the brooding presence of Mr Brown to deal with.

There’s no excuse for the government not to be trying harder to present a more coherent case for what it is doing. The Prime Minister David cameron should be leading from the front here, but seems strangely absent. But I think the Liberal Democrats should be doing more too.

For the Lib Dems the position is rather intriguing. The party took a huge hit in the Coalition’s first year, while the Tory standing increased, if anything. Now it is the Tories that are taking the main pounding. But there is little comfort for the Lib Dems here. They may not be heading for the opt-predicted wipe-out. But for them to advance beyond their current reduced poll ratings, the Government as a whole has to be seen to do better. And if the party fails to advance from its current standing, it will not play a major part in the next government, even if there is a hung parliament. The first lesson for the Lib Dems from the Coalition was to show differentiation. Now they must understand that it has limits.

Minimum unit pricing on alcohol – it’s all about cider

Perhaps to distract attention from the poor publicity surrounding last week’s budget (notwithstanding my general endorsement of it…), our Prime Minister David Cameron has moved the policy circus onto the pricing of alcoholic drinks. A rather unedifying debate has ensued. It’s worth trying to unpack this a bit.

The proposal is to force a minimum retail price on alcohol of 40p per unit. The argument put forward in its support is highly paternalistic, in the way of modern British policy making (or “evidence-based” in the fashionable euphemism). Alcoholic drinks are available very cheaply, especially from supermarkets. It is thought that this has encouraged excessive drinking. Although overall alcohol consumption is on the decrease there really does seem to be a problem with excessive drinking. The most conspicuous problem is “binge drinking” by young people, which tends to disfigure many city centres at night. There may also be a much less visible problem with middle class drinkers overdoing a daily dose of wine/gin-and-tonic. This all comes out in increasing problems with liver disease. It was reported by the NHS last week that deaths from liver disease in England have increased by 25% over the last decade, although alcohol consumption is only one factor, alongside obesity and hepatitis C.

It is, of course, the binge drinking that is creating the political pressure, upsetting as it this is to middle class and elderly voters. Most of the noise and antisocial behaviour occurs in the region of pubs and bars where the prices aren’t particularly low – but the story goes that the youths get themselves tanked up on the cheap stuff first. There may also be a problem with “happy hour” promotions by the bars to get people started. The Home Office strategy paper launched by Mr Cameron (as reported by the BBC) makes the rather extravagant claim that the policy would mean 25,000 fewer crimes a year and 900 fewer deaths “by the end of the decade” (in a classic use of confusing statistics – I think this means 100 or so fewer deaths per year, or 1% of liver deaths).

For paternalists it’s a simple matter of costs and benefits. The gains from reduced crime and health problems are set against the hardships and political costs for people who pay extra without indulging in antisocial behaviour. The last government baulked. Mr Cameron, it seems, is more determined to “do something”.

But liberals have a lot more angst about this. People should be allowed to make their own choices as far as they don’t harm others. Of course excessive alcohol consumption is antisocial – but there are two counterarguments. First a lot (most?) drinking is not antisocial. Second, taxes on alcohol are quite steep anyway, and surely cover all the extra costs, and more. And there is a rather nasty class twist. Few middle class drinkers will be affected, including the antisocial ones, but those less well off will be, including those that are not antisocial.

And that is about far as the public debate that I have seen gets. But it isn’t so simple. The big question to ask is how much profit are the sellers of drinks making? This matters, because if businesses are loss-leading on booze sales we need to ask why. Supermarkets aren’t charities. If they are losing money on booze then they are making it up somewhere else. I am deeply uncomfortable about this, and it undermines the argument that raising the price is an attack on the poor. People may be underpaying on the booze, but at the expense of overpaying on other goods. It may of course all be part of a careful segmentation strategy whereby middle class customers pay more for their supermarket goods than poorer ones, without the need for varying individual product prices. Even so, the idea that for poorer supermarket customers to benefit they have to by lots of drink has rather difficult implications. The issue of bars offering discounted prices in happy hours seems to be more straightforward: to entice customers into a state where their judgement is impaired and they will accept overpriced drinks later. This again will cause even liberals some angst.

So will a 40p per unit price just stop pernicious loss-leading, without impinging much on overall living costs? Retailers must pay excise duty (and VAT on top) regardless of the price they charge the customer. By my calculations this works out at about 20p per unit for beer, 25p for wine and 27p for spirits – but a mere 11.5p for ordinary strength cider (5%). Leaving aside the special case of cider that leaves 13p to 20p (or 11p to 17p allowing for VAT) to pay for the product itself and make a margin. That looks quite tight, but maybe feasible for beer at least.

But the case of cider is quite striking. Duty is much lower (especially for strengths under 7.5%), and the impact of the 40p price could be quite significant. In 2010 the dying Labour government increased the tax on cider – but this created such a stink that the change was lost when the election was called.

And that, I think, is the key. The government thinks that cider is unhealthily cheap, but it is afraid of tackling the problem directly by harmonising the duty with that charged for beer. So this minimum pricing is an alternative. The extra cost to the customer goes to retailers and manufacturers rather than to the state – but maybe that can be rectified at a later date. It will be easier to put up duty on cider if the minimum pricing policy is in place.

But liberals are right to be sceptical. 40p is a bit high to simply prevent pernicious loss-leading. And wouldn’t it be more honest to tackle cider duty head-on?

The friendless NHS reforms

The savages are circling around Andrew Lansley and his NHS reforms. Or translated into something more politically correct, the indigenous tribes have cornered the contemptuous invader, and are closing in for the kill.

Stories have been floating in the press that David Cameron is about to sack Mr Lansley and give way on most of his reforms, and particularly those that need legislative approval. Mr Cameron’s expressions of “full confidence” cuts little ice in this football-mad country, where club chairman habitually express full confidence in managers the day before sacking them. Mr Lansley and the reforms appear friendless. The various medical lobbies are building up against them; every few days another comes out against. The Tory press is hostile to indifferent. Lib Dem colleagues are urging me to sign a petition against the Health & Social Care Bill which is at their centre.

I can’t quite bring myself to sign, as somebody that basically supports reform. But I now think that they were a political mistake not really worth fighting for. And that may well be Mr Cameron’s view too. The risks of persisting with it are rising. There seems little chance of things settling down in time for the 2015 election, by which time chaos in the NHS could well be a top political issue. When the Coalition took over, the NHS had recovered its previously poor political standing. So far as the public was concerned, it wasn’t broke so didn’t need fixing. On the other hand if the government U-turns now, there is quite a good chance that the matter will blow over. Financial crises and hospital closures are bound to continue, but the whole thing will be rendered less toxic without these reforms to blame for everything. The political calculation seems quite clear, which is why a growing number of Tories are pushing for Lansley to go.

What would happen if Lansley went and the Bill was dropped? The new health secretary would be left with an enormous amount of executive power to continue a reform process – after all that is why the administrative reforms have made so much progress without the Bill becoming law. Ironically a lot of the Bill was about curbing this executive power and making it more accountable. But the focus of reform would be explicitly to make the service more efficient as demographic changes place it under ever more pressure. This would be a lot more difficult for Labour to attack, since that was what they were saying when in power.

It hasn’t happened yet, of course. I feel a bit disappointed that things have come to this. I dislike much of the criticism that the reforms have attracted, and especially to the resistance to the use of private sector providers, and the sharing of facilities with fee paying patients. The current NHS comprises a lot of good services swimming in a sea of mediocrity, and it has reached the limit of what can be provided if funded only from taxation. The GP side in particular is inefficient and lacks accountability. Beneficial changes require extraordinary amounts of effort to implement. There was a lot of nonsense and gobbledegook in the PCT-led commissioning introduced by the last government, largely designed by management consultants.

Still the reform process was too broad and too fast, and became ever more muddled as the process encountered resistance. I won’t mourn its passing.

Religion, morals and the flight from rigorous thought

Last Friday David Cameron, the Prime Minister, gave a speech on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, which got a sprinkling of coverage in the weekend press. In it he sought the help of Christianity and church leaders in helping to restore the country’s lost moral values, as evidenced by the summer riots, and Banking and MP’s expenses scandals.

My point isn’t to criticise this speech – I just don’t know where to begin – but to ask what such a speech says about modern politics. In terms of intellectual rigour it wasn’t even trying. But many people, and especially those of conservative instinct, will agree with its sentiments. A nostalgia for higher moral values in the past; linking the country’s identity to the Christian faith; the feeling that s stronger standing of religious faith amongst other people will improve the country’s way of life. The speech was no attempt to lead public opinion; it was following it. Some commentators pointed out the political conventional wisdom against “doing God” – but this was not doing God, it was doing a warm fuzzy glow around the idea of religious faith and moral values. As such it has not damaged Mr Cameron’s standing.

Such lack of acuity in a senior political leader is something relatively new in Britain, I think. It brings to mind Roy Jenkins’s remark about Tony Blair, in many way Mr Cameron’s role model, that he was “not a First Class intellect”. Very clever, but I bit fuzzy. It is impossible to imagine William Gladstone producing a speech like this one, or Margaret Thatcher, come to that.

This is a matter for regret. Surely our political leadership should aspire to, well, leadership? – and try seriously to argue their cause and persuade the country about their vision for the way forward. Even people who do not agree might see the force of the logic. Instead we get a few half-baked ideas designed appeal to supporters’ prejudices.

And as for improving the standards of behaviour on our estates and boardrooms alike, this is just hot air. Bad behaviour in these places, or their ancient equivalents, is absolutely nothing new, and does not correlate to a lack of religious standards – it has been known to permeate religious establishments. And high moral standards have been the excuse for the infliction of much cruelty and injustice (think of the treatment that used to be meted out to unmarried mothers) in a way that, ironically, contradicts what Jesus Christ himself taught. Religions don’t offer clear moral guidance, they offer a menu from which adherents pick and choose, and then claim the authority of heaven (think of the 9/11 bombers, West Bank settlers, Apartheid Boars, and so on).

Behaviour is a real enough problem. But our Prime Minister just leads a national whinge. He should aspire to more.

Is this the Eurosceptics’ Moscow moment?

Nearly 200 years ago, in September 1812, Napoleon reached the maximum limit of his nominal power when he entered Moscow with his army drawn from right across Europe. His empire covered France, Germany, Poland, Italy, much of Spain (his lieutenants were in the process of driving back an advance by Anglo-Spanish forces that had temporarily liberated Madrid) and now much of Russia, including its Asiatic capital. But he could not hold it; by the year’s end he had been forced to abandon Russia altogether, his army destroyed, and he was completely crushed within a year and a half. For the Russians 1812 had proved a time of incessant retreat, as they avoided battle until just before Moscow (at Borodino), where they lost and were forced to abandon Moscow without a fight, but ultimately a year of triumph.

Is this a fair metaphor for the British Eurosceptics in their moment of victory at the British veto at last week’s EU summit? Certainly their triumphalism is unbearable. Bill Cash was described by one of our outraged local Lib Dem members as “the cat that got the cream.” This follows one long process of retreat by British Europhiles as they conceded the political initiative to the sceptics, practically without a fight, time and again.

But the initial reaction of leading Lib Dems was strangely sanguine. Nick Clegg was initially quite supportive of David Cameron. On Friday night the deputy parliamentary leader, Simon Hughes, painted a positive picture to party members at a social event which I was attending. Mr Clegg has changed his tune today, of course. Whether that is because of the sceptics’ reaction, or because further details of what actually happened at the summit have emerged (for a flavour of this read the Economist’s Bagehot blog) I cannot say.

But the initial relief at the summit result shown by Mr Hughes has some logic behind it. A treaty would have required ratification by the UK parliament, and demand for a referendum. This sort of battle plays to the sceptics’ strengths – strong support by the press and a widespread wariness of extra EU power. A referendum on a treaty change is the battle the europhiles least want to fight. The sceptics can deploy a “have your cake and eat it” argument for a no vote – a vote not against the Union as such, but to protest against “Brussels”. There will be no such battles now. If there is a referendum it will be about whether we stay in the EU at all.

Instead the sceptics’ position might start to come under the sort of scrutiny that it has hitherto lacked, and be shown to be no more tenable than Napoleon’s hold on Moscow. The summit has started that exposure process. The sceptics’ armchair negotiators have said that we can use the British veto to negotiate major concessions, the “repatriation of powers”; but Mr Cameron proved unable to do this. It has also been said that we were not isolated in the EU, and we could lead a gang of pro-market non-Euro members. This against has been shown to be a hollow idea, as Germany has greater influence over these potential allies than we do. Indeed a horrible spectre emerges, that the British blocking tactics make many of the EU’s institutions irrelevant while the other countries set up alternatives over which the British have no say. The sceptics often complain about Britain shackling its fortunes to a corpse – but the corpse could be the official EU structures, rather than the European project itself…and that would be an outcome entirely of our own making.

And further eurosceptic fantasies will soon be exposed. Their aim is to set up some sort of free-rider relationship to the Union, where British products enjoy free access without to European markets without our businesses having to comply with those pesky social regulations. Some think the country can do this within the EU, using opt-outs, others that it can be done outside it, in the European Economic area (like Norway, Iceland and Switzerland). But this requires the other 26 countries to agree with it. All of them. Why should they?

Just as the Eurozone optimists are having their ideas tested to destruction in a gruelling series of financial crises, so the eurosceptics might find themselves on the wrong side of the argument. In both cases it is clear that the only tolerable escape route involves further European integration, not less. Perhaps, like Napoleon’s collapse in 1812, it will happen quicker than we think.

Does the Euro need a Big Bazooka?

It is a commonplace amongst Anglo-Saxon policy makers that the Eurozone leaders need to use a “big bazooka” to solve the currency crisis that is engulfing the continent. David Cameron has been particularly conspicuous in using this expression. Is it all it is cracked up to be?

So what is a bazooka? Originally it was a tubular musical instrument made famous by the comedian Bob Burns in the 1930s (Mr Burns and instrument in second picture). It then became the colloquial name for an American tubular hand-held antitank weapon introduced in the Second World War (the illustration above is in fact of a more modern and shorter weapon). This was a revolutionary innovation, using recoilless technology and the so-called HEAT armour-penetration system – which allowed infantry to threaten tanks in a way not previously possible. The Germans quickly copied it with the bigger and better panzerschrek (“tank terror”). They also developed countermeasures, including thin armoured outer skirts to their tanks, which set off the HEAT system before it could inflict serious damage. In the 1960s the weapon became obsolete, replaced by more powerful technologies.

A “big bazooka” in the current context is used to mean the deployment by the state (central banks and/or governments) of overwhelming financial resources to bail out troubled banks and others in a financial crisis. The idea is to break a vicious cycle of declining confidence in banks and others, whereby lack of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as creditors seek to move their money into safer places. The mere proposition of such resources can be enough to break the cycle, if credible, and prevent the resources ever having to be deployed. The Americans can proudly point out to the use of the technique to solve a series of financial crises, from the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, to the LTCM collapse of the 1990s and the Lehman crisis of 2008. Such tactics are conspicuous by their absence in the Euro crisis, fiercely resisted by the German political class in striking unanimity.

There is an irony that the original bazooka was quite a small weapon – but I suppose it was big for one held by a single infantryman, and the German version conveys all the imagery the metaphor needs. A more telling parallel is that the bazooka, revolutionary when introduced, steadily became obsolete as the world got used to it. No doubt the Germans will point out that the American use of “big bazooka” tactics on repeated occasions shows that there is a flaw. The American financial system suffers a systemic crisis every 10 years or so. This is the first such crisis the Germans have endured since their currency was refounded after the war – and that is because the Germans aren’t running the show.

The have a point. The financial markets are amazingly short-sighted – for example that idea that the US and UK are safe havens because their central banks can overcome any crisis by “printing money”, or monetising debt, in the manner of Zimbabwe. But the long term logic always wins in the end. There seems to be a slowly dawning realisation amongst Anglo-Saxon commentators (for example last week’s Martin Wolf column, as well as the Economist) that the German position in all this amounts to a strategy, “just enough, just in time”, and not the absence of one – even if Mr Wolf grumpily calls it “too little, too late”. The short-term costs of the German strategy are doubtless higher than the American way – but the longer term position is much less clear.