London Debate Unplugged on Sky News

The last and largest hustings for London Mayor the London Debate Unplugged will be broadcast by Sky News on Monday evening. It will of course include the three front runners: Ken, Boris and our very own Brian Paddick.

Much more importantly though, I will be taking part in the 'unplugged' part of the programme, as part of a panel of expert bloggers. I will be joined by Iain Dale and Alex Hilton aka Recess Monkey. The first part of the programme at 7.30pm will take part both on line and be broadcast on Sky News, then the debate will start and we'll be online during the add breaks to give our insight. Then for an hour after the debate finishes there'll be a big discussion programme, online, where the three 'experts' will be joined by both members of the various campaign teams and the audience.

I'm off to town this afternoon to buy a new outfit; as I have discovered in the last 24 hours that I have nothing suitable to wear for a trip to Sky News. Honest, it's not an excuse for a shop at all.

In response to Jeremy's call to sacrifice London...aaargh!!!

Jeremy Hargreaves in his blog suggests that 2 years of Boris in charge of London will be enough to scare the country in the general election off the Tories forever; unfortunately the comments aren’t working on his blog so I can’t tell him what I think of that idea! So, I’m going to have to post my response here:

So, Jeremy, the thing is, I don't think Boris Johnson would act as a vaccination.

One of the things about Boris is that he has a distinct 'Boris' brand which is separate from the Conservatives. The Tories knew this when they chose him; it's similar to Ken's brand which is distinct from Labour.

This distinct brand means that Boris is far more attractive to Londoners than the Tories would be.

A Boris win would allow the Tories to capitalise on that heading to the General election, though.

I think Boris will screw up London because he is incompetent and inexperienced; but I’m not sure that this will come through in the 2 years between a Boris win in London in 2008 and a General election in 2010, firstly, because Boris will have a honeymoon period and, secondly, because it normally takes a couple of years for things to unravel.

In the event that he has no honeymoon period and his incompetence is shown up early enough to impact the General Election the Tories will be in a good position to distance themselves from him. Boris isn’t using the Tory brand to get into power and therefore the Tory brand will not be so contaminated by his failure as you may hope.

A win for Ken; well I don’t think that’s going to have any impact on Labour’s electoral chances.

Another reason why encouraging Boris Johnson is a really, really bad idea...

Sorry to keep on about this but I’m hoping this little comment from Iain Dale’s blog (not him but one of his commenters, Danvers Baillieu)shines some light on why giving any vote for Boris is still a really, really bad idea; even if the fact that he’s incompetent, pointed out yesterday, doesn’t persuade you:

"I have just spent an hour or so handing out "Back Boris" oyster card holders outside Bank tube station. In all my years of campaigning, I have never seen such a positive response for a candidate. The card holders flew out of my (and the other volunteers') hands so fast we had to call to HQ for additional supplies. I realise that the centre of the City is not exactly enemy territory for Boris, but I still got the strong feeling that he is a popular front runner. After 11 years in the political wilderness, on 1 May Boris will show that the Conservatives are back."

Do you see that bit at the end there? The bit about the Conservatives being back? So, that’s the other really, really horrific thing about giving your second preference vote (or God forbid, your first; not that I’m religious, but you might be) to Boris Johnson.

Do we really want to give the Tories this momentum?

I’m pretty sure that the Tories know he’s an incompetent too. They’re just happy to let his media persona do some work for them for once and sacrifice London so that they can build up momentum for the General Election. After all, there’ll be plenty of them ready to pull his puppet strings. And to those (thankfully now receding proportionately in the Lib Dem Voice poll) who think it might be a jolly wheeze to place your second vote for Boris, and then just think about what a boost this would give the Tories.

If the Tories get a comfortable majority in a General Election off the back of a win in London, not only could some of that majority be at the expense of Lib Dem MPs, but we can say bye-bye to electoral reform any time in the near future.

No votes are wasted, even second ones. I know that the best vote is a vote for Brian Paddick but it seems we still have a FPTP mentality; the second vote is still there to be used and not ignored or frittered away in a fit of hubris.

My only hope is that, given that Mr Baillieu was giving out the oyster card holders at Bank, many of the workers were commuters living outside of London or that they didn’t know who was on the oyster card holder and were just happy to get a new one. Personally, I think the oyster card holder from Mulberry is far more chic!

Why Boris Johnson is a really, really bad idea.

Boris Johnson terrifies me. Boris Johnson terrifies me because if he gets into power he will ruin our fantastic City.

So, it is with horror and disbelief that I see the polls that put Boris ahead and even on Lib Dem Voice so many people are putting Boris as their second preference; although perhaps they’re the ones that don’t actually live in London and so won’t have to live with so many of the consequences!

For sure, there is much to be done; our roads are still too congested, our public transport too expensive and inefficiently run, people are afraid of crime and we have teenagers killing each other with knives and guns; but it is still one of the best cities in the world to live in. I am so, so proud of being a Londoner and I reckon we knock the socks off all our great city rivals such as Paris, Berlin and New York.

We need a Mayor who is capable, who has a passion not just for power but running things and changing them where they have to be changed.

Nothing, nothing I have so far seen, in this man Boris Johnson, gives me any indication that he could do anything more than make a joke out of the job. No, really; because unless presenting ‘Have I got news for you?’ is the qualification required to run the best capital city in the world, as I’ve not seen him do anything else!

And he proved this on Newsnight, last night, as Lynne Featherstone so adroitly points out. Boris once more showed us that this is just an exercise in vanity for him; that he is so much more interested in just being someone than doing anything. Lynne points out:

“Boris was appalling - and Paxman nailed him on his waffle approach by asking him for a figure for something he was proposing re-replacing bendy buses. Boris was baffled. Boris was bamboozled. But Boris didn't answer the question. Boris was exposed as not knowing a thing really about bus costs.”

And this is the thing: if you are capable, if you are experienced at actually running things and you are really interested in something then understanding the costs of what you wanted to do is easy. It trips off your tongue; you have rehearsed all the arguments in favour of something because you have rehearsed them with yourself. You have thought it through.

I am, in my professional life a Projects & Programme Manager. I am responsible for spending millions pounds of my clients’ money and (obviously) ensuring that they either save as much or are able to bring in much, much more extra revenue as a result of the changes that I and my teams will make in their business and organisations. I can tell you right now, how much money I have spent, how much money I am going to spend, how much I should have spent and how much the extra thing that the MD asked us to do actually cost. I know how much money we’re going to save or earn, what that relies on, why it might not happen. I know all that stuff. Off by heart, without looking. If you woke me up at three in the morning and I was still half asleep I’d probably be able to give you that information before I could tell you my name. Or your name*.

I know, with passion, what the most important issues are, what the risks are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. Of course I do; for somebody charging what I do, you would expect no less. Indeed, if you wanted to employ someone for the job of spending millions of pounds on behalf of your organisation you’d probably look for a CV that proved they had done that sort of thing before, with some evidence of successful outcome.

Well, step forward Brian Paddick (tick), who has managed millions of pounds worth of policing and been so successful in Lambeth that when he left there was a grass roots campaign to bring him back – he made a difference, a positive difference. When asked about dealing with gun crime last night he was passionate and fluent in his response.

And even, though I have to hold my nose as I say this, step forward Ken Livingstone (tick). I don’t like Ken, I don’t like the company he keeps, the way he wastes money, the permanent self promotion that he undertakes and the dodgy deals and cronies that he keeps in work. But I have to concede that, although he has usually nicked the ideas of the Lib Dem Group at GLA, he can at least implement change and run a city. Not as well as I would like, but he has not been the disaster I thought he would be eight years ago (there, I can stop holding my breath now).

But Boris Johnson? Nothing, nada…no experience and, it looks pretty clear to me, no interest in and passion for running or doing anything. Is the mayoralty a Tory compensation prize for a man with the delusion that he could’ve have been something? You see, I don’t think Boris is stupid; I’m sure the man is very clever, writes a good column and even I concede that he can be amusing on telly; but he does not have the competence to be the Mayor of London. Frankly I wouldn’t employ Boris to answer the bleeding phone in my company, let alone run the bloody thing.

And so, I just do not understand why so many people would have Boris as their first or second choice on May 1^st.

If you care anything about London and the people who live and work in it, you will not put a cross anywhere near the name of Boris Johnson. Put your first choice for Brian Paddick, he is undoubtedly the best candidate; but whatever else you do, don’t let Boris Johnson ruin our beautiful, wonderful, vibrant city!

*Although, to be fair, if you woke me up to ask me that sort of stuff at three in the morning, you may no longer need a name as I may be tempted to commit some sort of ‘cide’ on you.

Obama and the women's vote

Early on in these primaries it seemed quite clear cut, Hillary had the women’s vote and because there were enough women, she was winning the race to the Democratic nomination.

All the US commentators are now saying that one reason that Barack Obama is pulling ahead from Hillary is that the women’s vote is abandoning her and has gone to vote for Obama. Now, I know women don’t vote as a block etc, etc but there are significant amounts of movement in voter’s demographics to see a trend that aligns women and voting intentions.

This new development does seem to be flying in the face of my pretty strong defence, yesterday, of identity politics as a rational way forward. Having slightly sophist tendencies I have been for some days now putting this move towards Obama as a result of his wooing of female voters and the attention his campaign has paid in the last few weeks to them and matters of interest to women voters. I mean you would, wouldn’t you if you were looking at your campaign strategy? I still think this is the case.

However, here on the CBS News website Elizabeth Cline does an interesting analysis of the young female voter and the fact that it is them, as far as anybody can tell, that are voting in increasing numbers for Obama. So what makes a young female voter make different decisions from an older female voter?

“College has become one corner of American life where hardworking females are consistently and fairly rewarded, and they are succeeding there, to a much greater degree than their male counterparts. It's possible, maybe even likely, to graduate college with little sense and zero experience of institutionalized gender discrimination -- with almost complete freedom from the type of covert, daily setbacks that drive blacks to the polls for Obama and older women to vote for Clinton.”

This resonates with me. I can’t say that I left University with no feminist consciousness. I identified myself as a feminist before I went to University the roots of my feminism going deep, deep into my upbringing and experiences growing up (or at least, watching the experiences of the women around me). Whilst at Aberystwyth, studying International Relations, I took courses on feminist theories of international relations and indeed that was where I got a grounding in the various feminist political theories which allow me as great an understanding of them as I have of say liberalism or fascism. I arrived at University a feminist and left a slightly better educated one!

But I will say that at University I had never felt or had any personal experience of discrimination myself – although I had seen it, especially, weirdly, in the Drama Department; despite there being many times more women in the department than men, the plays used for people’s practical examinations tended to have very strong male roles and hardly any substantial female parts at all; rather concerning if you are trying to achieve a 1st or even a 2:1 by playing the third washer woman from the right! But, I am digressing…..

No, it’s only as I have got older that I have become more and more aware of the under the radar, structuralised, many faceted, drip, drip, drip of barriers to women’s progress and equality and, indeed, have experienced them myself. And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, one of the least oppressed women on the planet!

It makes me sad that it’s the case, but I think as you get older and come across these barriers, you do get to understand that no matter how you think the world should be theoretically, in fact, it isn’t like that! As Cline says:

“…the advantage women have in college quickly slips away in the working world. Women get paid a lot less than the men they graduate with, no matter how much extra work or hours they put in. One year out of school, women working full-time are earning 80 percent of what their former male classmates are making, according to a 2007 study by American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. And this fact hasn't budged over the past ten years -- despite the advances women have made on campus”.

The positive thing is that when you do have a meritocracy, which people believe in, then they do start to drift away from identity politics, as can be seen in, what Cline terms, the ‘girl-positive’ environment of college and/or University. But out in the real world where there’s power and money at stake, not just good grades, it’s not so ‘girl-positive’ and the identity politics and an understanding of how the world really does work drifts back in. Cline summarises:

“Young people are going to continue to impact this election in unprecedented ways -- a force of history that leaves me simultaneously in love with young people's fervor and optimism and unnerved by their lack of interest in Hillary. For the candidate, the parallels between college and the real world are striking. She has worked hard and done what's expected of her, but may very well get passed over by a less qualified guy when payday comes”.

Identity Politics:can we ignore it?

Identity politics makes liberal democrats nervous; understandably, because as liberals we believe that every one is equal and it is the principle, the processes, the policies that count rather than the colour of our skin, our gender or our sexuality. Liberalism is about universalism. As Stanley Fish makes an argument in his NYT regular ‘Think Again Column’

“The history of liberalism is a history of extending the franchise to those who were once excluded from it by their race, gender or national origin. Although these marks of identification were retained (by the census and other forms of governmental classification) and could still be celebrated in private associations like the church and the social club, they were not supposed to be the basis of decisions one might make “as a citizen,” decisions about who might best lead the country or what laws should be enacted or voted down. Deciding as a citizen means deciding not as a man or a woman or a Jew or an African American or a Caucasian or a heterosexual, but as a human being”.

But Fish goes on to argue that you can define identity politics in two ways. First is very simple tribal identity politics, the he or she looks like me, looks like they’d go to my church /golf club type of tribal politics; the form of identity politics that owes nothing to rationalism and is abhorred by all liberals. But there is a second, rational form of identity politics that is based on common interests, Fish goes on to explain:

“Because she is a woman as I am” is of course a reason, but it is not a reason of the relevant kind, a reason that cites goals and programs, and argues for them. But suppose what was said was something like this: “As a woman I find government sponsored research skewed in the direction of diseases that afflict men and inattentive to the medical problems faced by women, and it is my belief that a woman president will devote resources to the solution of those problems.” That’s an identity politics argument which is thick, not thin; the she’s-like-me point is not invoked as sufficient unto itself, but as it relates to a matter of policy. The calculation may or may not pan out (successful candidates both disappoint and surprise), but it is a calculation of the right kind.”

This is similar argument that I made a few weeks ago , my belief in the necessity of diversity is based not on the shallow basis of colour or sex but on the fact of different experiences which give people a very different view of which problems that need to be solve dare the most important and how it is best to solve them.

I’ve pointed out in previous posts the massive increase in engagement by previously disengaged groups in the US primaries is clearly due in some good part to the diversity of the candidates, in the democratic if not in the republican race and that voting for someone on the basis of identification with them, that is, whether they’re black or female is an entirely rational thing to do; and I only observe in passing that it looks like white men have been doing exactly that for years!

OK, so this is all going on in the states and they’re different to us, aren’t they? Well, if you think that you’re being more than a little naïve.

I believe that we ignore diversity at our peril and if we continue to play just lip service to it then, for all our fine Liberal Democrat policies, we will find ourselves identified as an irrelevance by voters. For me, diversity has benefits in it’s own right however, what I think about that pales into insignificance when looking that the role that identity politics is going to play in elections in the future, whether we think it should or not. And if you think that Labour and the Tories haven’t noticed what is going on over in the States with regards to identity politics then, really, think again. Some of us, although not me, may well have to hold our noses but sooneror later, if we want to stay in the game we’re going to have to learn how to play it.

16 ways of looking at a female voter...

Now why can we have analysis like this at election time in British newspapers?

Increasing voter turnout the democratic way....

This really interesting posting from a Clinton activist (thanks to Duncan for having the feed on his website) goes to prove that the most exciting thing about this Us nomination race is the impact that the diversity of the candidates is having on ‘hard to reach’ or ‘never reached before’ voters!

According to NewHampster out of the 10,000 votes polled where she was campaigning that day 1,000 were registrations on the day…and from her experience of being on the ground these were mainly women. Not women who had switched from Clinton to Obama and back again at the first sight of emotion but women who had not intended up until that point to vote.

She also describes the Obama crowd that came in to vote around midday as looking like “the line for a rock concert”. Would that any polling station in the UK ever had a line, let alone one that looked like that for a rock concert!!

If this isn’t a lesson for all those concerned about voter apathy not to realise how important diversity is then I don’t know what is! I am finding it all just so exciting!

Diversity isn’t just a ‘good thing’ or the ‘right’ thing to do - it will get us more votes, more councillors, more MPs, more AMs, MSPs and MEPs!

How are we going to attract more women and ethnic minorities to join us and ensure that as a party we reflect the people that we seek to represent? So that in future elections in the UK we reach the thousands of young men and women who are currently don’t see the point of voting? And crucially how are we going change ourselves to attract a more diverse group of people?

Women come out for Hillary!

So, it would seem, from a quick review of what's being said, that Hillary's win in the New Hampshire primaries is as a result of women coming out for her in the last few days. This is confirmation that in politics gender certainly matters.

And once again, I ask myself in a country where women make up 52% of the population why we don't take more electoral advantage of those women who do put themselves up for a selection; particularly in target, by election and vacated held seats. As Lib Dems we may not think the gender of the candidate relevant but it looks like voters do. Even in the UK there is a 2% increase in female turnout if there is a female candidate (and a neutral impact on male voters); 2%, well, that can make quite a difference at times, can't it?

You see, although I do think that diversity is 'a good thing' in it's own right, I do find the fact that diversity helps win votes an even more compelling argument for having more of it!

Lynne in her blog post this morning can almost be heard sighing over how far equality has to go if male BME MPs are having to defend their choice of Hillary vs. Barack lest they should be seen as disloyal. Lynne looks forward to a time when colour or gender doesn't matter when choosing a candidate, when all that matters is whether they are the best.

Well, I think that's wishful thinking. Firstly, because I believe that for the vast majority of voters the decision of who to vote for is intuitive and a response to an engaging political narrative or (and this may be the same thing) an identification with the candidate. It is rarely a rational assessment of the pros and cons of the candidates skills set and policies, so hankered after by us political activists.

Secondly, even if voting wasn't such an intuitive matter that still leaves us with the problem in defining best; this is entirely subjective. It may be, if I had a vote in the US elections, best for me that I vote for a woman who has experienced all sorts of below the radar prejudice herself and is conscience of all the invisible, non legal hurdles that women have to climb even to compete in the workplace, for example. That would be quite logical for me, I guess.

And to prove my point, If I did have a vote in these elections I would be voting for Obama...for the intuitive reasons outlined above; I have completely fallen for his political narrative. That doesn’t mean though, I would be outraged if Hillary got the nomination.

However, what is most exciting is how riveting the democratic nomination process is this year!

As someone who is much more interested in the issues that politics has sway over rather than the game itself, this is the first time that US politics has captured my imagination. And it would seem from the increased turnout that it has captured the imagination of many voters in the US who previously couldn't give a fig for primaries!

It surely can't be that the idea that, if the Democrats win, they will either be putting a women or a black man into The White House for the first time, has nothing to do with it? Imagine if we had such diversity at the top of politics in the UK, might not that lead to a resurgence of interest in politics that we Lib Dems could capitalise on?