Been busy...

It's been a busy week in Lanson Boy's life. I was up in Cambridge on Saturday to watch the mighty Cornish All blacks defeat one of the strongest teams in League Two with a last minute try and conversion.

Being Cambridge, I also had the chance to stay with my randmother and meet up with two cousins who were in town at the time.

Then it was off to Kent to do a couple of days photography with PPCs and county candidates - first of all in Shepway and then in Canterbury. It was great to meet up with Neil and with Guy, our excellent PPCs for the two seats. It was also good to see the hard work that is going into the county campaign there. The Lib Dems have not done so well in Kent recently but I think that it is almost certain that we will make huge gains on our six county seats in June.

This week will now involve catching up although I plan to be in London on Thursday for the gurkha event. Stay tuned for pics...

Pics - Jon Brandling Harris in action for the Cornish All Blacks against Cambridge; Catherine Bearder and Guy Voizey in Whitstable harbour; Shepway

I thought the Tories were meant to be the low tax party

There's a danger that, come the end of the day, it will be the Tories who are being least adventurous in their plans for cutting taxes in order to help beat the recession. That, to me at least seems a bit against the grain.

First we have the Lib Dems who have plans to cut up to £20bn and target these tax cuts at low to middle income earners and pay for it by closing tax loopholes for the rich.

Now we have the Tories who are restricting their promises to cutting NI payments for employers who take on people who have been jobless for more than 3 months.

I suspect that, in about an hour's time, we will get the usual blizzard of credit system proposals from Labour which will benefit some of the lowest earners, particularly families, but cost more in paperwork than they manage to give out to real people.

Let's look at the Tory proposals for a moment. They seem perfectly worthy to me. But just so very, well, timid. They almost seem like something that Gordon would propose. Tories don't do this sort of fiddling about at the edges. They do big bold gestures. Except now they haven't.

I think that when it comes to public understanding, the Tory proposals are going to seem very small beer indeed.

But Dale is also an arse...

Despite what I said below, Iain Dale is being a bit of an arse in his post about prisoners voting rights. Quite apart from the pointless mischaracterisation of Lib Dem policy (he seems to imply that the Lib Dems want the judges to force prisoner voting rights on the UK), he seems to be oblivious of the concept of how a democracy works.

First - any democracy needs to have a judiciary whose role is to make sure that the constitution is complied with. In the US that job is much easier because there is a written constitution and a strict separation of powers which sets out the duty of the judiciary to overrule the other two branches of government where they believe that the law is unjust. But even in the UK, there is a place for judges who are prepared to say that the system is unfair. The Courts did so recently when they said that gurkhas who had served the UK should have the right to stay in the country.

So for Dale to say that judges making law is a bad thing is to misunderstand the way democracy works. Where Parliament is unfair, it is the job of judges to act.

Now I am happy to accept that many people think that prisoner voting is a bad thing. But I disagree with them. I believe that the task of prisons is to rehabilitate prisoners. If we strip them of their voting rights then we send them (yet another) message that they are not part of society. I believe that allowing prisoners the right to vote (by post for the constituency they were living in before sentencing) could be beneficial for rehabilitation. Almost half the countries of Europe allow prisoners to vote and I have seen how it works in practice when I was an election observer in Ukraine. With small modifications (prisoners had no choice about when to vote - only whether), prisoner voting works in even the newest democracies and in person.

I do believe that judges should have the right to strip prisoners of their right to vote as an extra punishment. Personally, I would only do so for people who had committed electoral fraud. But I accept that this is a matter worthy of debate.

Dale is not engaging in debate but using the subject as a means of beating up Euro judges. And that is why he is being an arse.

Iain Dale is right...

Dale is right that it is ridiculous to cheapen the concept of democracy by having celebrities sitting in our legislatures simply because of how many photos they have in Hello!

(And Mark Pack is also right that it is stupid to give people lottery tickets for voting. We need to make voting something people actually want to do.)

Politicians 1 Punters 0 (and why Brown will call the election soon)

Political Betting identified a massive split between the politicians and the punters over who would win Glenrothes. The politicians mainly believed that Brown had turned things around and could pull it off. The punters felt that the Nats would walk it. Of course the politicians were right and Labour secured a massive majority. Even Guido is having second thoughts about 'Jonah' Brown.

What is also interesting to note tho is that the political commentators also got it spectacularly wrong. They were all (at least, according to Politics Home) calling Glenrothes for the SNP.

I have a strong aversion to the so-called expertise of the broadcast political editors in particular. I don't think that an ability to buy lunch for someone who then gives you a couple of tidbits on a no-names basis is a particularly worthwhile skill. They aren't reading the runes at all, simply repeating what others tell them. And, with a couple of honourable exceptions, there is a herd mentality among the whole of the Westminster media. Once a thought develops then the papers and TV all run with it no matter the evidence to the contrary. And all too often they are wrong (and even when they are right it is because they have pushed the story).

So they got their comeuppance with Glenrothes (not that they will admit it. Heck, most probably won't even notice).

And what does this mean for the timing of the General Election? Brown has to give serious thought now to calling the election early. Of course he is still behind in the polls but look at the evidence:

- Cameron still has high approval ratings but all on the basis of sounding good. He still has no policies because policies take time to develop. If an election were called now then I suspect that the Tory manifesto might be full of holes and certainly not everyone would yet be singing from the same hymnsheet. Plenty of splits for Mandelson to exploit;
- The economy is going to hell in a handbasket, but it won't get any better between now and the last moment for calling the election. At the moment Brown is riding high on his plan to save the world. Pretty soon people will start to realise that the plan was not all that magnificent; hasn't helped their pockets at all and wasn't even his to start off with.
- He's actually enjoying himself;
- The Obama effect. For all that Cameron is the new, inexperienced one, the UK public will see Obama as a Democrat as more akin to Labour and McCain as a Republican as more akin to the Tories;
- The Tories are falling apart over stupid little thing like George Osborne and Caroline Spelman. (Ok, 'falling apart' is too strong, perhaps 'occasionally forgetting to concentrate on the big stuff' is about the right level).

It's not a given, of course, and Brown still has to contend with an election in winter, but it is my guess that he will think in one of two ways. Either he will be arrogant enough to think he really is this good and can turn anything round and can afford to wait, or he will realise that this is a happy coincidence, that things will go down hill again and to seize the moment.

And what Brown will have to do above all else is to keep a lid on his own Party bickerings. He has squashed Miliband (D) and is under no real threat at the moment, but he needs to keep Mandelson in the back room where he does good and not all over the front pages. He needs to hide the useless ones and (dare I say it) adopt a Lib Dem image. We only ever get two or three people on the media (because they don't know who anyone else is), perhaps Brown should seek to make sure that only he and a couple of the other (public approved) ministers ever make it onto TV.

The return of 'brisk'

Old election hacks like me remember the days when news reports on polling day would only ever describe turnout in two ways. It would either be 'brisk' or steady'. Regrettably, nowadays we also have to resort to the word 'slow'.

But it is good to see that the Times at least is upholding the old traditions.

via Darrell G

Bloody BBC

For all that Auntie is the nation's favourite, I've got to add my voice to those, including Iain Dale and Mark Pack on LDV, who have criticised their coverage of the US elections last night.

I don't disagree with the decision to send so many staff over for the coverage. I think that it was justified given the importance of the US, the historic nature of the election due to Obama's candidacy and the excitement about the result. In fact, I think that the BBC should be putting more effort (not quite as much as this, but significantly more than they do at the moment) into covering the elections of our other major partners - France, Germany, Japan and so on. People accuse the UK of being too US-minded. I think the understanding that comes from following elections, and in particular the debates over policy, informs the UK public about those countries and increases both their understanding and their sympathies.

But what a disaster the coverage was. Jeremy Vine couldn't remember how to get his screen to work and at times ended up prodding wildly at it. He had clearly got a crib sheet to tell him where to press when he wanted to highlight a particular county on the map but the insight we gained was minimal. He never explained why we should see this little bit of Ohio as being more significant than that little bit of Ohio. As ever, the BBC demanded 45 second segments and so we never got into the meat of it.

The studio guests were largely terrible. Larry the psephologist was ok, but most of the others had so little to add as to be a waste of space. Christopher Hitchens and John Bolton both made me want to throw stuff at the TV but as it was my brother's new 32 inch plasma I restrained myself. But at least they said something vaguely interesting and better than the blandness of most of the others.

The outside broadcasts were the worst. What is the BBC fascination with talking to ordinary people? You never hear from enough of them to make it worthwhile as a scientific poll and, because they are not Brits, we have little chance of feeling empathy for them. Better to stick with experts on the ground. But even these were strictly mediocre. It was good to hear Jesse Jackson - I presume the US networks wouldn't touch him - but most of the rest were so 'toe the line' partisan as to be not worthwhile. I don't want to hear that the Chair of the Bumfuck, Oklahoma Democratic Party thinks that Obama is great - I think I could have guessed that this would be their view. And it is historic that the US has elected its first non-white President. But we learn nothing from hearing endless African-American (or indeed white) voters simply telling us that it is so. We need more depth than that.

The bloggers were so useless and uninteresting as to provide a chance to go and get another beer. There are many great US bloggers out there and I'm guessing that they weren't all (if any?) taken up by the US networks. Why couldn't the BBC find a couple who knew how to string a sentence together and had something to say. Even if they represented fairly singular points of view they would have added something. I don't have a clue what the two bottle blondes were supposed to be doing. Were they meant to be giving their own opinions or reporting what others were saying. We certainly never knew from the 20 seconds an hour each was given to speak.

I felt it was fair enough for much of the concentration to be on what an Obama Presidency will be like once it became clear he would win - even before he got 270. Some people were using these discussions to accuse the BBC of bias. But various reporters were embarrassingly over the top well before that. I heard Richard Bacon on 5Live watching Obama vote and the screams he emitted when the guy's car came within 15 feet of him would have done a 60's Beatle fan proud. Get a grip man - you're supposed to be a professional.

And the producers should be shot. Not just for the failure to link properly - and that was bad enough. But it was always going to be the case that the first couple of hours would need filler discussions. So where was the in depth discussion of how the Electoral College system works. Better to do something once and well than take 20 seconds explaining it badly every hour. What about the fact that the US is a two party system. Let's discuss why the third party candidates are a sideshow this time (and also about the time Ross Perot wasn't) and what the two party system means for the way the election works.

And, fundamentally, let's have proper discussions about what each result means and a proper debate between people from each camp. Interrupt if there is genuinely something useful or new to say, but otherwise why not let a debate or segment run on for 5-10 minutes. You've got the tickers to keep people up to speed on the nuts and bolts of what has already happened.

I was lucky enough to have my laptop with me while watching and kept up to date with Dale's live chat (and thus what the different networks were saying) and with the Betfair markets (although I wasn't betting). These provided blessed relief from the most inane segments of Auntie.

The whole 'calling' thing was the subject of much debate on Dale. The BBC took the difficult decision to go with what ABC said (or AP and one other network) and I think, on balance, that was fair enough. It would have got a tad confusing if they had simply taken what the first network said about any state and there was no way they could justify seeking to put in the infrastructure to call for themselves. But they managed to foul up royally with the whole Fox/Ohio thing. They mentioned that Fox had called the state for Obama but failed to note that this was a mistake and Fox immediately retracted. Instead they simply kept schtum until the state was actually called for Obama some 20 minutes later - clearly they just made the assumption that it would come good in the end. Isn't that a form of misinformation of the kind that the BBC are supposed to be stamping out?

Side note - I await the first politician or commentator to bemoan the fact that in the UK we don't have 3 hour queues outside polling stations, isn't it terrible etc etc. Well if you cut the number of polling stations in half and have 25+ contests on the ballot we might well do so!