Communications interception — dazed half-memories of a conference call with @julianhuppert
Yesterday, I attended a blogger’s conference call with Julian Huppert MP and a special advisor from the Home Office, which was to discuss the proposed communications interceptions bill. At first it was just Huppert and myself, and I embarassed myself with my lack of political knowledge (I’d not read the Queen’s Speech yet because I’d been too busy not doing that), but we were joined by Richard Flowers, Richard Morris, Helen Duffet, Mark Pack, Jennie Woods, Caron Lindsay, Zoe O’Connell and Jonathan Calder. Zoe and Jonathan have both written about it already — some of the rest may have, too, but I haven’t checked my feed reader since about 9PM yesterday.
I did take detailed notes of the first half of the conversation. Unfortunately, one of the participants then said that a lot of what they’d said was off the record, and as I didn’t take perfect notes as to who said what (and took no notes at all for the last half), I’m going to be deliberately vague about a lot of stuff here, and try to ensure that I don’t tell tales out of school.
So I’m going to paraphrase here, and give MY INTERPRETATION of what is going on. This is *INFORMED BY* the conference call, but in paraphrasing and eliding details I may have got things wrong.
First things first, the so-called ‘draft bill’ going round is nothing of the sort. It’s a Home Office briefing document, and one that was written fairly early in the process. The draft bill *has not yet been written*, or at least has not been finalised.
It appears that the original intention of those who proposed the bill in the first place was to have something very like the worst rumours that have been out there, but that this has been *definitively* quashed by Lib Dem activists and MPs. It sounds to me like the Home Office (or elements within it) wanted to sneak one past us, and they couldn’t.
Despite the rumours, the stuff about blocking porn by default will *NOT* be in the draft bill.
The main point, however, is this:
The draft bill will probably be bad, *but that is not the end of the matter*. When it comes out, it will look horrible, and people will scream about it. When that happens, it will be a good thing if you let your MP know exactly what problems you have with the draft, but *do not panic at this stage*.
The bill will be going in front of a Parliamentary Committee, which Huppert is on, and which will be *extensively* modifying it. They will be doing so on the basis of advice from technology companies about what the actual technical implications of the bill will be (Huppert is probably the single most technologically clued-up person in Parliament, and he freely admits that he needs expert advice from people who know more than him. Much of the sheer awfulness of most legislation relating to the net (IN MY OPINION – this part did not come up in the call) arises from the fact that it’s written by middle-aged arts graduates who don’t know what it is that they don’t know, so the fact that they’re actually going to ask people with a clue is itself a major improvement), advice from civil liberties groups (Huppert mentioned Liberty, No2ID and the Open Rights Group as people whose opinions they will be asking for), and from non-affiliated individuals whose opinion will be useful (he mentioned Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales here).
The end result will be something far, far better than the draft bill. We can’t know what that something better will be yet, obviously, but the general rough lines will probably be:
Far fewer people having powers to order interception of communications (did you know that right now everyone from the police to your local council to the postal services authority can legally get access to records of every phone call you make and email you send? Not the contents of the message, but who it was to — and they can do it without a judicial warrant, and without you ever knowing.) — the ideal will be to have it be that only the police and security services can do this, and only with a judicial warrant, though we may not get that ideal.
An “air gap” whereby the police can’t directly access the databases held by ISPs or websites, but can only request data from those companies.
And then, and only with those additional restrictions, the ability for that smaller group of people to access contact data — data of who you’ve contacted through, eg, Skype — in the same way that the current larger group of people can access details of who you’ve emailed or phoned — if and only if that can be done without storing or decrypting the contents of the messages. If it can’t (and it is my understanding that it can’t, but I don’t know enough networking stuff to be sure) then that won’t happen.
The end result *should* be that a bad bill goes into the process, and a bill comes out that, while not good from my point of view, will mean that overall there is less state intrusion into people’s private correspondence, not more, and that what state intrusion there is will be for, if not good reasons, at least better ones. I can accept as plausible an argument that there might be circumstances in which the police or security services might need to know who talked to whom in order to prevent a terrorist atrocity. I don’t accept as reasonable the current situation, where councils can (and have) check people’s email records and have them followed because they’re suspected of letting their dogs foul the pavement.
If my understanding of what was said at last night’s call is correct, while the draft bill will be bad, the result of the scrutiny process *should* be that at the end of it we move from the current situation (where we have legislation in force already from the last government that frankly puts most of the structures for a totalitarian surveillance state into place, ready for any unscrupulous politician to use) to one where the worst excesses of the last government are rolled back slightly, though nowhere near as far as I’d like.
So while I can’t say I’m at all happy at the proposals, I have enough faith in Huppert’s record on both civil liberties and tech stuff that if he says the end result will be an incremental improvement, rather than things getting worse, I’ll take his word for it, at least until we see the bill after the committee’s scrutiny.
Other people who were on the call — could you please clarify or correct in the comments? I think I’m giving the correct impression here, but I’m terribly worried I’ve got hold of the wrong ends of several sticks…
Quote of the day
From daweaver in the comments to this post by Jennie Rigg
The whole NHS changes kerfuffle reminds me of the Twilight series. It’s badly written, lots of people get very het up and shout over the minutest detail while others wonder what the fuss is about, and there’s a huge wall of impenetrable and badly-written text to read just to make any sensible comment about the whole thing.
Quite.
I’ve now read through that bloody bill, in full, three times (once when it came out and twice yesterday reading the amended version, flicking back and forth between it and the two acts it’s amending), and whatever one’s thoughts about the changes in the bill itself, it can’t be a good thing when someone like myself (relatively intelligent, I’d like to believe, and definitely reasonably educated and literate) can read through such an important piece of legislation and come away still unsure as to crucial elements.
A lot of the changes in the bill are actually good ones. Some are stupid. But huge chunks of this bill will, as far as I can tell, end up being decided by courts as people argue over what rights and obligations it actually confers. And I can’t say I’m happy about that. We need some way of getting legislation to be human-readable, but I’m not really sure how one would do that. Any ideas?
(Posts about music and Doctor Who will come soon)
The most important single part of the NHS Bill
“The services provided as part of the health service in England must be free of charge except in so far as the making and recovery of charges is expressly provided for by or under any enactment, whenever passed”
What this means is that if the bill is passed, only those charges that already exist can be made by the NHS unless and until further legislation is explicitly passed allowing it. This is the crucial piece of wording (it’s an amendment to the 2006 Act’s wording, which didn’t have ‘as part of the health service in England’). It means that *any* new charges to patients have to be explicitly included.
Despite the stuff being put about by Ben Goldacre et al, this is the crucial point. This bill *does not* provide for any further NHS charges. It guarantees a continued free health service. Disagree with the bill if you want (I do), but do it based on the actual bill, not on scaremongering.
And I just wish everyone would stop using scaremongering rhetoric, so I don’t have to post stuff ‘defending’ stuff I disagree with. Argue about the merits of the bill all you want, but please stop saying it’s the end of the NHS, or it privatises the NHS, or it will introduce charges, because it just *doesn’t*. Crying wolf will only mean that if or when a serious effort to do those things ever happens (and I suspect it more likely to happen under a Labour government than this one, because people trust Labour with the NHS, though God know why) no-one will believe you until it’s too late.
Quick thought on the NHS bill
I think the NHS bill is a bad bill, but it’s not as bad as its detractors say, now. It’s entirely possible that Lib Dem conference will vote to kill the bill tonight, but even if they don’t, I don’t think it will do the things its detractors say, now that it’s been amended significantly in response to previous Lib Dem objections. I think it’s a waste of time and effort and yet more bureaucratic meddling and change for change’s sake, but it won’t hurt anything.
That said, the people arguing against it do have one thing absolutely right – the NHS is one of the most important things in this country, and it is vital to defend it. I don’t care especially how it’s structured or how much is contracted out to different organisations – whatever works, works. What I care about is that we have free healthcare, provided to anyone whatever their means.
So I, at least, will make the following absolute commitment:
If, at any time between now and the next election, I or anyone I know in England makes a GP or hospital visit and gets charged (for anything other than services which are already charged for such as elective vaccinations when travelling abroad) I will quit the Lib Dems and campaign for any party which would in my view restore free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. A lot of us have talked about what red lines we have in coalition government, and this one is one of mine.
That said, I’ve made a commitment, is there any supporter of a non-government party who will make either of these:
If the Lib Dems successfully kill the bill altogether, they will never again, for the lifetime of this parliament, say that the Lib Dems have been ineffectual or have made no difference in government.
If the Lib Dems decide *not* to kill the bill, and if by the next election none of the conditions I mention above apply (so no-one’s getting charged to go to hospital or visit their GP, and from the point of view of the typical patient nothing’s much different), they will admit, publicly, that their party’s leadership have been outright lying and can’t be trusted to tell the public the truth about the NHS, and will campaign instead for the Lib Dems as the party which actually did something useful and fixed the bill so it wouldn’t harm patients.
I suspect not. I am absolutely certain that one of the two options above will happen, and within three years everyone will have pretty much forgotten there was a bill at all. I am equally certain that this won’t stop supporters of other parties (not just Labour – the Greens and SNP are as bad) making up horror stories about the next piece of legislation that comes up, so “the ConDems” will be privatising schools, bringing back hanging, declaring nuclear war on Sweden, or whatever.
I hope to be proved wrong.
Why I’m Not Discussing Politics Much Right Now
Posted this to Facebook, but then thought it might as well go here too.
I’m having a lot of difficulty in discussing politics at the moment. The problem is that so often debate is polarised between two false alternatives, and actually trying to even express an opinion makes me either have to equivocate so much the point gets lost or conversely accept framings I fundamentally disagree with.
“Do you agree with the health bill?”
“Well, no, actually, I think there are various problems with…”
“Great! I’ll add you to my Save Labour’s NHS From The ConDems Who Are Destroying It petition, shall I?”
“Er, no… I think the problems with the NHS bill are precisely those areas where it’s most similar to Labour’s policy…”
“Ah, so you’re a Tory bastard who hates the poor, then?”
“No… I think the basic idea of the bill is sound, but making it compulsory for GPs to take on extra admin work, rather than optional, for example is a terrible…”
“OK! I’ll put you down for the End The Evil Postcode Lottery campaign!”
“No, I *like* the idea of localism, and people in an area deciding for themselves what their health priorities are…”
“You ARE a Tory!”
“So I’m a Tory because I trust my GP more than, say, Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust who were rated second-worst in the country and who sacked a nurse for comments related to her union activities?”
“Yes, because she was organising against a trust run by a LABOUR council”
I get so tired with that argument though, and many others like that, that I often end up just saying “Yeah, smash the evil bill”, because I do think that on the whole the health bill is a bad idea (and a missed opportunity when we could have argued earlier in the process for a genuinely liberal NHS) and I end up sounding like the worst kind of authoritarian Labourite. Either that or I just hurl abuse at the person I’m arguing with.
I suppose this is the dilemma of the Liberal throughout the ages — agreeing with Labourites about (some of) the problems but disagreeing about the solutions — but it’s put into focus more when the Lib Dems are actually in government, and working with the Tories.
(This is NOT an invitation for a debate over the health bill, for precisely the reasons above. Nor is it a dig at any particular Labour member, or indeed Tory. If you don’t argue like that, then it’s not about you.)
Sixteen Good Things The Lib Dems Have Achieved
With the Welfare Reform Bill being debated in Parliament at the moment, a lot of good Liberals are once again worrying about to what extent they can carry on supporting the party. Some of the provisions in the bill are excellent (the universal credit, for example, is a policy the Lib Dems and before them the Liberal Party had for decades, but we dropped it for being too left-wing and radical), others are debatable (a cap on total benefits equal to the median income of the country – there are genuine arguments on both sides here) and a few are frankly horrible (cutting contributions-based ESA for some claimants after a year).
Now, to a large extent, even the bad things this government are doing are defensible. All three major parties agreed, before the election, that cuts had to be made, and this graphic by Duncan Stott illustrates how far the Lib Dems have actually won in minimising the cuts:
And that graphic is taken from a post written before the government announced it was slowing down the rate of cuts.
In other words, a Labour government or Labour/Lib Dem coalition would have done substantially the same things, and a Tory government would have cut much more. This is actually as moderate a government as it was possible for us to get in 2010.
But so often this is the only argument made for the Lib Dems – that we’re making things less worse (that is to assume for the sake of argument that all cuts are bad. I’d argue in fact that a lot of government spending – on illegal wars and nuclear weapons, for example, could be cut without any bad effects). We say things like “Well, we’ve got an exemption for nearly ten percent of orphans in the Widows And Orphans (Massacring) Act 2011, and we’ve got a sunset clause included in the Slaughtering Of The Firstborn Bill so it’ll have to be re-debated by Parliament in four years.”
Those sorts of things are, of course, real achievements, but they don’t really feel like it, do they? Thanks to us, some bad things some other people were going to do are now less bad, but still bad – that’s not a rallying cry to stir the blood.
But in fact, we have also done a lot of genuinely good stuff, things that make the world a genuinely better place, that wouldn’t have been done by any other government. I’m going to make a short list here, but it’s not an exhaustive one – it’s just a list of things that I or my friends have noticed. My main areas of concern are human rights and constitutional reform, while most of the people I’m close to in the party are particularly active in LGBT+ Lib Dems, so those are the areas I’ll highlight. But I’m sure if you talk to people interested in, say, transport or energy policy you’d get a similar list.
No longer deporting LGB people to countries where they’re at risk. Under the last government, the policy was “they can stay in the closet”.
£400 million extra for mental health services, targeted especially at talking therapies Having worked in mental health under the previous government, one that supposedly cared more about the NHS than this one does (their supporters say) I can say from my own experience that the Labour party deserve never, ever to be allowed near government again simply because of their appaling, criminal, *EVIL* treatment of people with mental health problems. Mental health services are already improving under this government (I’m having to access services myself at the moment, for work-related stress problems, and the difference is extraordinary). This is something that was a personal campaign by Nick Clegg.
Lords reform The first elections for the House of Lords are planned for 2015. We might soon actually be a proper democracy.
An end to child detention of immigrants Private Eye argue with the letter of this, but the fact remains, under Labour literally thousands of children were held for weeks or months in what amounted to concentration camps (primarily at Yarl’s Wood) prior to deportation (or not – half were later found to be legal immigrants). Last year, numbers in the low double figures were held for single-figure hours immediately prior to deportation. I don’t care if Private Eye thinks that counts as ‘child detention’ in a literal sense – in a qualitative sense there is a huge, enormous difference.
An enquiry into the UK’s part in torture in the ‘war on terror’. I’ve seen photos of people literally boiled to death by torturers in the Middle East, supposedly acting with the collusion of the British government. These people need to be brought to justice.
The highest ever rise in pensions and unemployment benefits. Pensions are now on a ‘triple lock’, which means they will rise with whatever is greatest – inflation, wages or cost of living. Unemployment benefit rose by the same amount this year.
Lowering taxes for the poor and raising taxes for the rich – Capital Gains Tax has increased by 10%, there’s been a levy on the banks, we’ve kept the 50% top rate of tax, there’s talk of introducing a mansion tax – and this is being used to raise the personal allowance for income tax so the poorest workers won’t have to pay anything.
Actual gay marriage is going to be brought in, not just the compromise that is ‘civil partnerships’. (EDIT should read ‘same-gender marriage’. *slaps wrist* BAD bisexual ally! BAD!)
Detention without charge has been dropped from 28 days to 14. Still too long of course, but we’re some way back towards being a civilised country again.
DNA data of innocent people is being destroyed
Gay men convicted of ‘crimes’ involving consensual adults that would no longer be illegal are having their criminal records expunged
We have fixed-term parliaments – no longer will elections be at Prime Ministerial whim – this has been a demand of reformers since the Chartists.
The ID Cards scheme and database have been ended
The government will guarantee most of the mortgage for first-time buyers – allowing those of us who’ve spent our entire adult lives paying rents to profiteering landlords because of the artificially-inflated property ‘boom’ to finally have the possibility of owning our own home, ending a particularly nasty piece of generational injustice.
The government are also building more social housing than has been built in decades for those who still wouldn’t be able to buy their own home, so they don’t have to rent from slum landlords.
No replacement for Trident will be bought this parliament – because if you’re going to cut spending, take the money away from nuclear weapons first.
So this is why, despite the fact that I don’t support the government, I *do* support the Lib Dems in the government, and why I give up several hours of my weekends to go knocking on doors and delivering leaflets. Because we haven’t made the world perfect in only eighteen months with only nine percent of the MPs in parliament – but we’ve made it better. And that’s more than I can say about the actions of any other government party of my lifetime.
ERS – The Wrong Kind Of Reform Slate? #yes2stv
This is an honest question, and a request for information.
I’ve been a member of Unlock Democracy for a few years, and took part in the disastrous AV campaign (though thanks to a lot of work by activists in Manchester, we did much better than the national campaign). Straight after that, I joined the Electoral Reform Society.
That may seem a strange, even perverse, decision, but the AV referendum is not the end of electoral reform in the UK. Just look at Scottish devolution – failed referendum in 1979, successful in the late 90s. But it probably *is* the end of AV as an option, and I wanted to campaign vigorously for STV (a better option in any case).
If nothing else, the AV referendum showed that this isn’t just a Lib Dem issue – twice as many people voted Yes as voted Lib Dem. It’s something that can be built on, horrendous as the result was. And I wanted to push harder to get STV.
The ERS is the only organisation that *just* campaigns for STV (though it agreed to take part in the AV referendum as being a massive improvement). Unlock Democracy, for example, is now campaigning to keep Lords reform at the forefront (we’ve got a stall on Saturday the 27th in Manchester, if you want to come and help out), but the ERS is strictly about STV, so I joined.
However, I’m not *at all* happy with the way the AV campaign went – millions of pounds, and tens of thousands of supporters’ hours, were pissed up the wall by the campaign, which was led by the ERS and Unlock Democracy. So I want to see some real reform of the ERS.
The ERS council elections are happening (by STV) at the moment, and a slate of candidates are standing as the reform slate. My initial instinct was to give all of them high preferences. But looking at their manifestos I feel worried.
Almost none of them actually state that they support STV. This shouldn’t be a reason to worry – it could well be assumed – but it still seems odd. Many of them refer to ‘PR’ or ‘fair votes’. On top of that, many of them talk about ‘expanding the ERS’ mission’.
The cumulative impression – especially since so many of the reform slate talk about their experience working for the Fabians or other talking shops – is that the reform they want to see is to change the ERS from an organisation dedicated to STV and broaden it into a more amorphous campaign for, y’know, fluffy good stuff and against bad things, but that they want to keep the essentially talking-shop nature of the organisation. It *looks* like the reform they have in mind is something like the way Blair ‘reformed’ the Labour party – which is the exact opposite of what I want to see.
BUT
This is just my gut impression, and is based less on what these people are saying than what they’re not saying – in a very short space for personal manifestos. I’ve not been involved in the organisation long, and of the fifty-three candidates, I’m personally acquainted with two, know one more by reputation, but otherwise have only these manifestos to go on. It could be that the reform slate are passionate, committed activists for STV and everyone else knows this. I’m just getting a hunch, and I never trust those.
If the reform slate want real reform of the type I want – making the ERS into a truly effective grassroots-led campaigning organisation for STV – I’ll gladly give them all high preferences. If what they want is to be another think-tank with unspecified ‘progressive’ aims then I’ll give them the lowest possible preferences. Does anyone actually know which is the case?
(I understand that some people I know may not want to say anything publicly, because they know people standing for the council. If you have anything to confirm or refute my hunch but want it to stay private, please either email me or post a comment under a pseudonym – first-time commenters get held for review, and I’ll not publish anything from a new commenter that doesn’t say “OK to publish” in the body).
A Few Good Things The Lib Dems Are Doing…
Here’s the thing…
I’m not a supporter of this government. Of course I’m not. I’m a Lib Dem, and this government’s MPs are 5/6 Tories.
But nor have I been a supporter of any other government in my lifetime (possibly I may have supported the dying days of the Callaghan administration, but I was only a few months old at the time, and rather politically naive). And as far as I can see the bad things this government is doing are the same bad things that every government of my lifetime has done, while it’s doing a few good things that none of the others have. And the good things seem to me to be pretty much entirely down to the Lib Dems.
Furthermore, the Lib Dems also seem to be preventing a lot of the worst ideas the Tories have.
However, the ranting about ‘ConDems’ and so on seems to have left a lot of people – decent people, for the most part – with the impression that by going into coalition with the Tories, the Lib Dems have ensured that Satan will rule the earth for a thousand years. Because the very real good stuff that’s being done really isn’t getting spoken about.
So every so often I’m going to just do a quick run-down of good things the Lib Dems are doing as a party – either good government measures they’ve brought in, good new policies from the party, or bad government measures they’ve stopped. This doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly turned into some government loyalist – *FAR* from it – and I’ll continue attacking bad government decisions as much as anyone. But it should go some way toward explaining why I’m still in the party.
Vince Cable and Danny Alexander resist pressure to drop the 50% tax rate – though they may support replacing it with a mansion tax (probably a good idea – taxes on property tend to be fairer than taxes on income) they’re ensuring that any tax cuts benefit poorer, rather than richer, people.
The party is likely to call for an inquiry into decriminalising drugs.
The worst parts of the Digital Economy Act are getting dropped, and copyright law will be reworked to make better allowances for personal use. Julian Huppert is still pushing for even more reform, though.
The Hughes Report, if implemented, will ensure more young people from poor backgrounds get to go to university.
The Lib Dems, unlike other parties, stood up to Murdoch and refused to be bullied.
The government will be the first to add new social housing since Thatcher started selling council houses off.
And so on… this is just a list of things from the last three weeks – see this for some of the other things the Lib Dems have already done.
And these may look like only minor good things – and the ones from the last few weeks are, though the ones in that last link include some major, important, good things – but other than the first three years of the Blair government (which brought in a few decent things like the minimum wage) I can’t think of any government in my lifetime where I could list even that many small good things they’d done.
So yes, I’m going to continue to fight against the illiberal tendencies of this government, and to ensure that the Liberal members live up to their professed ideals, but I’ll continue to do so from within the party.
This has been going round the Lib Dem blogosphere
But only because it’s so great. And since I am too headachey to write tonight, I too will reproduce Paddy Ashdown’s wonderful speech on Lords reform in full. This kind of thing is why, despite everything, I still feel at home in the Lib Dems:
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon:
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that in a democracy the minority is always right. That thought has given me much comfort over the years as a Liberal, and it appears that it will have to give me comfort in this debate as well. I spent an engaging hour and a half yesterday in the House of Lords Library, looking through opposition speeches made in December 1831 to the Great Reform Act 1832 and to the Reform Act 1867. Five arguments were put forward. The first was: there is no public call for such reform beyond those mad radicals of Manchester. The second was: we should not be wasting our time and money on these matters; there are more important things to discuss such as the Schleswig-Holstein problem, the repeal of the corn laws or the crisis in the City that caused Anthony Trollope to write his wonderful novel.
A noble Lord: Not in 1832.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: No, but in 1867.
The third argument, which was put so powerfully—indeed, in bloodcurdling terms—by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, was that if we were to embark on this constitutional terra incognita, the delicate balance of the constitution would collapse around us; mere anarchy would rule upon the world.
The fourth argument put forward in those debates was, “No, no, let us not disturb the quiet groves of wisdom within which we decide the future of the nation by letting in the rude representatives of an even ruder republic. God knows what damage we shall do if such a thing should happen”. The last and fifth argument was the argument actually used by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, just a moment ago: “if it ain’t broke, don’t mend it”.
Those are the arguments that were put forward against the 1832 Act, the 1867 Act, the 1911 Act—every single reform that we have ever had—and they are the arguments that are being put forward now. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Perhaps I might explain before I come to the substance of the argument.
The first argument is that there is no public interest in this matter. Of course there is not; it is our business, not the public’s. The public have made it very clear that they do not trust our electoral system in its present form. Is there anyone in this Chamber who does not realise that the dangerous and growing gap between government and governed that is undermining the confidence in our democracy must be bridged? It must be bridged by the reform and modernisation of our democratic institutions, and we have a part to play in that too. This is not about what the public want, it is about us putting our House in order.
The second issue is that there are more important things to discuss. I do not think so. Frankly, we have been very fortunate to have lived through the period of the politics of contentment. The fragility of our democratic system has not been challenged because the business of government and democracy has been to redistribute increasing wealth. If we now come to the point at which we must redistribute retrenchment, difficult decisions, hard choices, I suspect it will come to something rather different, as we see on the streets of Greece today and as we saw on the streets of London not very long ago. This is very important.
The third is that we are embarking on a constitutional journey into terra incognita. Of course we are. We do not have a written constitution in this country. I wish we did, but we are told that the genius of our constitution is that it is unwritten, that it responds to events, that it develops, that it takes its challenges and moves forward. Oliver Cromwell did not have to say, “We will delay the Civil War until we have worked out the proper constitutional relationship between Parliament and the King”. In 1832 they did not say, “Let us hold this up until we have decided what proper constitutional balances would be achieved”. If you believe in the miracle of the unwritten constitution, you must believe that our constitution will adapt. You cannot argue that that is a good thing and then say that we cannot move forward unless we know precisely and in exact detail what will happen next. Of course this will change the balance between us and the other Chamber. It will not challenge the primacy of the other Chamber, but it will challenge the absolute supremacy of the other Chamber—that is called check and balance.
The fourth argument is that this will disturb the gentle climate of wisdom in this place. I have no doubt that there is unique wisdom here, although I have to say that I do not believe it is necessarily evenly distributed—maybe in some places it is, but not everywhere. However, I am not persuaded that there is less wisdom in the 61 second chambers that are elected, that there is less wisdom in the Senate of the United States, or the Sénat in France or the Bundesrat in Germany. I do not believe that the business of election will produce less wisdom than we have here now—rather the contrary. It is not wisdom that we lack; it is legitimacy. My old friend, Lord Conrad Russell—much missed—used to say, “I would happily exchange wisdom for legitimacy”, and I will tell your Lordships why.
This is where we come to the final point—the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd: “If it ain’t broke, let’s not fix it”. It is broke; it is broke in two fashions. First, our democracy now and our institutions of democracy in this country do not enjoy the confidence of our people in the way they did. That confidence is declining. We have to be part of the reform that reconnects politics with people in this country. If we do not, our democratic institutions will fall into atrophy and may suffer further in the decline of the confidence of the people of this country. If noble Lords do not realise that, they do not realise just how difficult the current situation is in Britain.
We in this Chamber cannot leave this to others to do. We must be part of that reform, modernisation, reconnection and democracy. It is said that this House does its job as a revising Chamber well. So it does. It is allowed to revise, change, amend legislation, but is it allowed to deal with the really big things? It does the small things well, but is it constructed in a way that would prevent a Government with an overwhelming majority in the other place taking this country to an unwise and, as we now know, probably illegal war? No, it would not because it did not. I cannot imagine that the decision to introduce the poll tax and the decision to take this country to war would have got through a Chamber elected on a different mandate and in a different period, or if there had been a different set of political weights in this Chamber from the one down the other end.
The truth of the matter is that we perform the function of a revising Chamber well, but that is not our only function. We are also part of the checks and balances in this country. The fact that we do not have democratic legitimacy undermines our capacity to act as a check and balance on the excessive power of the Executive backed by an excessive majority in the House of Commons. That is where we are deficient and what must be mended.
The case is very simple to argue. In a democracy, power should derive from the ballot box and nowhere else. Our democracy is diminished because this place does not derive its power from democracy and the ballot box but from political patronage—the patronage of the powerful. Is it acceptable in a democracy that the membership of this place depends on the patronage of the powerful at the time? We are diminished in two ways. We are diminished because we do not perform the function that we need to perform of acting as a check and a balance on the Government, and we do not do so because we are a creature of the Government’s patronage. I cannot believe that noble Lords find that acceptable in this Chamber .
A noble Lord: Time.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: Perhaps noble Lords will forgive me, I will finish now. I have already strained my time but I ask for patience. The Leader of the House is right. We have spent 100 years addressing reform in this House. It is time to understand why that is necessary—both to make our place in modern democracy and to fulfil our proper function to provide a check and balance on an Executive who may get too powerful. We turned our hand to this 100 years ago; it is time to finish it now.
A few lessons from last month’s disaster
I’ve been thinking about the lessons the Lib Dems can learn as a party from last month’s debacle at the council elections and the AV referendum, and have come to a few conclusions that seem a little different from the consensus on the ‘blogosphere’.
We need to concentrate more on constitutional reform
Everyone seems to be saying “Well, we lost the AV referendum, that shows that the public don’t care about constitutional issues, so we should concentrate on bread-and-butter managerial stuff that people care about, and give up on Lords reform.”
Well, no.
Firstly, what people want and what is the right thing to do are two different things. This is undoubtedly the only time in my lifetime we’ll be able to get Lords reform – it’s not like we’re going to get a second term, is it? – and the way the system is set up directly affects all those things that people *do* care about.
Secondly, Lords reform is a far less controversial area than reform of the Commons electoral system. I’ve lost count (literally) of the number of times I’ve had this conversation with my dad, a typical Labour voter:
“I’ll never vote for that AV thing, it’s a load of rubbish, a miserable little compromise [thanks Nick...] and it’s just to keep the Lib Dems in power for ever. Now what you really should do if you care about democracy is get the Lords elected.”
“Well, we are doing that…”
“You only went into this to get AV and you’re not even going to get that, you should get the Lords elected instead.”
“We’re doing it as well…”
“Get the Lords elected instead.”
But also, a point to remember – more than twice as many people voted ‘yes’ in the referendum than voted for us!
For every Lib Dem voter there’s at least one more person out there who *doesn’t* yet vote for us but *does* like our position on constitutional matters. And those people are *passionate*. They voted Yes despite one of the most inept political campaigns I’ve ever seen or heard of (as Millennium put it, it appeared to be run by people who’d masterminded a lot of third place triumphs in General Elections for the Lib Dems, so they considered second place an improvement). The 60% who voted no didn’t, as far as I can tell, really care that much either way – they had a slight preference, and they expressed it, but many of them were voting to ‘get Clegg’ or ‘to break up the coalition’ or (in a few insane cases) because they wanted more radical reform.
When you’re on 17% of the vote, going after the 40% who passionately agree with you is probably better strategically – as well as being the right thing – than going after the 60% who mildly disagree.
However:
We need to link our principles explicitly to our actions
Community politics works. It not only wins us elections, but it’s undoubtedly the morally right thing. Work with communities, find out what those people want, and help them to bring it about themselves, rather than imposing something on them. It’s both the liberal thing to do and an election-winning thing to do.
There was, however, a rather good cartoon posted on Lib Dem Voice recently, an old one from the 80s:
(Interesting that it’s an SDP politician. From what I can gather (being a small child at the time) they were rather less keen on the community politics stuff than the Liberals were in the Alliance days.)
There’s an element of truth in that, but it slightly misses the point.
People vote for us because they like that we get the potholes in their roads fixed. The problem is, they don’t know *why* we get the potholes in the roads fixed. WE know that community politics is a valuable Liberal tradition and springs from everything we believe in. THEY don’t know that. Which means then that people get upset when we act in unpredictable ways like going into coalition with the Tories rather than just being the slightly fuzzier, squishier version of Labour. Or WE get upset when people who tell us they’re lifelong Lib Dem voters also tell us they’re going to vote against AV, because they’re not interested in reform.
We need, as Jonathan Calder has said, more ideology and less policy. I like this post on the subject,, but especially Simon Titley’s comment:
If I were to establish a rationale for Liberal Democrat ideology, I would start like this:
Each of us is on this planet for a relatively short period of time. In that short time, each of us seeks to lead a good life. But, each of us has a unique personality and so each person will have a distinct idea of what will fulfil them. Therefore, the only person who can decide what constitutes a good life is ourselves; it is not something others can decide for us. To be able to make those decisions, we need freedom – not merely an absence of restraint but the practical ability to exercise freedom; not merely a ‘chance’ at the start of our lives but an ability that lasts throughout our lives. Hence we should see freedom in terms of ‘agency’, which means the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them.
Our political mission is therefore to ensure each person’s freedom.
Our starting point is our humanity. We value people above things; we do not make a fetish of the state or of markets.
We should rework our policies to better fit values like this (Jennie has a great suggestion re: employment law for starters) – right now everything should be up for consideration. We should look at all the old Liberal ideas like a citizen’s income (especially since we’re pretty much getting that with the benefit reforms), Land Value Tax (especially since Vince seems quite keen on the idea in principle), zero-growth economy (could easily appeal to the Green vote) and so on, and see if any of them are worth bringing back – possibly in a modified form, but worth consideration. Drug law reform. We’re down to our core vote, so we have little to lose – let’s try to have a genuinely radical set of policies to go with the people in the party.
(Note I’m not suggesting we actually go with any of those particular things as policies – I have very, *very* little knowledge or understanding of economics, and for all I know I’ve just said “why don’t we consider dooming the whole planet to dying of starvation?” – but they’re all ideas that have long had a currency in the Lib Dems and our predecessor parties, and so they’re the kind of ideas we should be looking at.)
But we also need to link those policies, and our actions in local government, to our principles in a very obvious way. We need to start talking about political philosophy.
I don’t mean we need to be handing out copies of John Stuart Mill [and Harriet Taylor], like the Gideons, or turn into a SWP-like debating society (“Well, I think you’ll find that Keynes said…”, “If you’d only *read* Michael Meadowcroft’s position paper from 1981, The SDP Are All A Bunch Of Bastards, you would *know* why you were ideologically wrong!”, “We must expunge every trace of reformist Grimondism from the party and get back to the true Liberalism of Lloyd George! An end to female suffrage!”). What I mean is that our campaigning should, along with saying *what* we’re doing, say *why* we’re doing it.
Come up with some simple bullet-point summary of Liberalism – four or five points, something like the preamble to the constitution – and make sure one of them’s on every page of every Focus. If you have “Lib Dems fight to save local schools” page, put something on there about the principles of valuing education and of valuing independence from centralised decision making. Nothing huge, just a box with a bullet point at the bottom – “Helping people to help themselves is one of the Lib Dems’ key principles. Find out more at http://libdems.org.uk/what-we-think “.
That kind of thing will, hopefully, help convince our voters to think more liberally and convince liberals to think of voting for us.
And finally, for now (I have some thoughts on co-operation with other parties, which might not be what you’d expect from me, but I’m saving them for later as this is long enough as it is):
Things are going to get better for the party
I know a lot of tribal Labour people who spent much of the last year attacking the Lib Dems quite viciously. After the council election (and the recent hatchet-jobs on certain Lib Dem MPs by the right-wing press) they seem to have stopped. The public mood appears now to have swung against attacks on the Lib Dems and more to feeling sorry for us. “They’re not that bad really.” “I don’t like that Clegg but it’s a shame that Councillor X lost hir seat”. Richard Herring (a comedian I like but who has been one of the more vitriolic critics of the coalition) said of the council election results “It’s like breaking into the Top Gear studio with a gun with one bullet and then using it to shoot Richard Hammond when Jeremy Clarkson’s right there”. Plenty of other people have said things like “I think the Lib Dems were just naive, they’ve been tricked by the Tories. It was their own fault, but the Tories are to blame.”
That may not sound comforting, but these are people who were spouting utter *hatred* about the party fairly recently. Some of them no doubt will again. But I think the attacks on us have started to lose public sympathy, and over the next few months we’re going to turn more and more into the underdog in the public’s eye. Which is not a good place to be, but it’s better than being the whipping boy.
[NB I have used the word tribal in this post. I dislike this word and consider it to have racist connotations. However, I don't know of a better word for it.]
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