The inevitable consequence of inexperience

Well, Boris Johnson may be, as Neil says, in danger of underming his own narrative but it seems that he's well on the way to delivering on the narrative that I set out for him before he was elected.

Which is, for those of you that need reminding, that someone without the experience of running a large organisation or mananging a budget or a team of people will not have the experience to know whether they have chosen the right people to shore up that lack of experience. So 'having good people around him' will never make up for the fact that he is a dilettante playing at being Mayor.

The resignations of first, James McGrath and now Ray Lewis just show that Boris is lacking in judgement when it comes to people. Mr Lewis' seeming inability to distinguish what as actually happened against what he would like to happen, in the way he claimed to be a magistrate when he wasn't, is a character flaw that shouldn't have been too hard to pick up.

Boris Johnson is now having to play with the grownups and it would see that for all his intellience he just doesn't have the experience to do it well.

Whither the bendy bus

Ok, Bendy Buses: Dave Hill has got me excited on this in his Comment is Free piece this afternoon and I, and as on all things Londonian, have a very strong opinion on them.

So, here goes:

Firstly, if you looked at all the things that needed money spent on them in London today can we all really say, hand on heart, that buses, not having more of them but just changing the style of them, is the tip top priority for the whole of London?

More important than housing, reducing crime, dragging the tube into the 21st century, ensuring that the rail companies take the oyster card, the Olympics (well, maybe they're more important than the Olympics), congestion, climate change, the Thames barrier, keeping young people occupied on something else than stabbing each other, the threat of bombs, the City, making the west end more pedestrian friendly etc, etc, etc?????

I would say this week, like 16 other weeks already this year, many Londoners will be wondering what we can do about the high rate of teenage knife crime. Will replacing bendy buses with a modern version of the routemaster help? No, not really. Having conductors could help in an indirect way, I suppose. But, you don't have to have a routemaster to have conductors and frankly, it might be better to put the money to funding the British Transport Police; just a thought.....

I find it offensive the Boris Johnson is wasting our money on something as frivolous as this. If he was going to start up some new bus routes and put the routemasters there, then that at least would have the redeeming feature of improving public transport in London. But this, this is just frivolous!

Secondly: OK so, I too liked the open platform. It was great fun and very good for shopping on Oxford Street because the bus never went to fast that you couldn't just step on at any point down the road. But that's about it. They were too small and poky, too hot in summer, a nightmare to get off if you had any sort of shopping or luggage. And do I need to mention the fact that wheelchair users and mothers with buggies couldn't use them?

Boris Johnson told us that he was going to represent all Londoners but replacing accessible buses with routemasters is the opposite of inclusive.

I remember not long after the routemaster was phased out watching a young mother with two kids, one of whom was severely disabled. She waited at the bus stop, got on the bus, sat down putting her son in the wheelchair in the space allocated to them and then after a 5 or 10 minute ride she got off the bus and carried on wherever she was going. That journey would have been impossible with the routemaster; her new found freedom (and let's face it the efficiency because she doesn't have to use taxi's so much now) was breathtaking!

Routemasters were only fun for some people and moving away from the inclusive city that we have become should be resisted.

Thirdly, for many, many years before they were finally taken out of service the routemaster like the bendy bus that followed it only really served central London and a few arterial routes. The majority of Londoners and London bus journeys don't even use them, particularly in the suburbs. So once again, a whole lot of fuss over the centre of London and the suburbs are marginalised. Which is pretty damn surprising as it was the suburbs wot won it for him....when, oh, when will we have a Mayor that is interested in all Londoners?

The mort time we spend discussing whither the bendy bus the less time Boris has to spend on the real problems that Londoners are dealing with every day not a made up problem like the demise of the routemaster

What's happening with the Party Reform Commission?

aka the Bones commission: do any of my fellow Lib Dems know?

My undestanding is that they were going to report after the May elections and whilst I know there has been some additional consultation going on with local parties, is there an updated timetable?

Or did we decide to delay the strategic reform required to ensure a step change in our electoral success, to fight 2 by elections on a purely tactical basis? (Although if someone could tell me what the tactical advantage was, that'd be great). Maybe I should just go and find a wall to hit my head against.

Just to put it in perspective, the costs of just one by election could have been invested in employing a full time (maybe even two, depending on the level of experience that you want) organisational change professional for a year and you could implement the commissions findings (whatever they are) in a fraction of the time and actually enable allow us to deliver on Nick's objectives of 150 MPs within 2 elections.

Hillary isn't the only woman in the Democratic Party

Should Barack Obama pick Hillary as his VP? On balance I think not; the narrative that Obama won on was that of a change, a new way of doing things. Hillary, as a Clinton, quite clearly doesn’t embody that narrative (and it’s in the rules of narrative that you have to embody it). To have a Clinton as VP would undermine his narrative and would endanger his election. Plus, it would be very awkward in the White House.

I always veered towards Barack Obama but I was very well aware of importance of Hillary’s position; the first woman to have run a serious campaign for the democratic nomination. I understood, in the face of the misogyny that she endured during the campaign, why she had to keep going. Why it was so important not to let the (largely male) party grandees pat her on the head and tell her to let the man through unimpeded. Even as someone who has leant towards Senator Obama during the campaign, I can see that a woman with a similar CV would’ve been laughed out of the race straight away.

So, do those of us who long for real diversity in politics have to sigh wistfully and just be grateful for all the ways, just by standing for the nomination, that she has made a difference to politics and women’s place in it; as candidates, as voters and as commentators. Politics, in the US in any case, has changed forever as a result. Should we just wait out the next 4 years?

Well, no.

An article from The American Prospect website has got me thinking. Just because Hillary would be the wrong Vice President, it doesn’t mean to say there can’t be a woman Vice President. As Dana Goldstein points out, in the VP contenders women make up 2 out of 3 of the top choices (if you discount Hillary herself). Goldstein goes on to say:

“We've experienced unprecedented interest from male politicos in women's participation in the electoral process. And demands for women's leadership have been given their fairest hearing to date in the United States, with Democrats nationwide expecting Obama to give close consideration to female vice-presidential prospects -- not only because there are a few wildly successful and talented women who would be great at the job, but also as a gesture of good will toward the feminist energy that animated so many Clinton supporters”.

And so:

“…in addition to Clinton herself, Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas are among the top three most frequently-mentioned vice-presidential prospects, trailing only Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.

The Vice President is a funny old job and can be fairly made into whatever the holder wants it to be. However, the VP must be good enough and at no point would I suggest that anybody without the right qualities to become the Vice President should get there just because of their symbolic value.

But if they were to meet the criteria and have a symbolic value, as a role model to half the world population, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

So, I’m going to count up the differences that Hillary has made for women in politics and hope those differences translate from the US to the UK. But I’m also going to hope that Barack obama, a symbolic candidate in his own right understands that value of role models and that leadership of change, of cultural change comes from the top.

Living with Boris

Well, thankfully not literally but having had a very harrowing last few weeks, it has come to my notice that Boris really did get in.

And it’s like this: I was really against Boris getting in, not so much because he was a Tory as I don’t much like non nuLabour Ken but that I didn’t think he was really up to the job. However clever he is (and I do believe he’s clever) he lacks the experience to run an £11bn budget and my lovely city. And I’m not convinced by the idea that he will gather a group of knowledgeable people around him; he lacks the experience to know and recognise when someone is mucking it up.

Still, he’s in and I find my desire to make London the best city that it possibly can be, is greater than my distaste for this man. So, I’m not sitting back to watch him fail, with glee in my eyes. I am hoping that he doesn’t fail; I am hoping that he brings in good policies and improves this city. Because if I’m honest, I love this city more than I love party politics.

So, how is he doing?

The Drinking Ban: pointless and illiberal. It’s not people with open alcohol containers that create the problem, it’s people disturbing the peace and being violent. I don’t think that alcohol containers being open of not makes the slightest bit of difference. This is nuLabour gesture politics. I dislike it’s illiberalness but apart from that, I don’t think it’ll harm London, it just won’t help London. A wasted opportunity. The ‘riot’ will be neither here nor there in a few months.

The break up with Chavez: This I actually applaud. I haven’t given much thought to why Boris has done it; I suspect it has more to do with not subsidising bus fares than an ethical foreign policy for London (it’ll be easier to cut the subsidy later, without a fanfare). After all, the Tory just lurve the Saudi’s, don’t they? So, I’d be surprised if Boris was put off by the whiff of corruption that follows Chavez around. Still, I’m happy about it, because I don’t like having a deal with London giving Chavez, the man who shuts down TV stations that don’t agree with him, any airs of respectability.

The big bill for the transitions team: My eyebrow is only half raised. It is expensive, especially when you compare it to the permanent staff pay packet. But, but, if you look at the private sector incomes for these kind of people, especially if they’re working on a fee basis rather than salary, whilst it’s still pricey, it’s not so far removed from the market rate. It is, however, I fear down to the lack of experience that Boris Johnson has in actually running anything that he’s paying private sector market rate type prices. It’s all very well having an attitude of paying to get the best, when you yourself earn £250k for the part time job of penning a newspaper column, but there just isn’t the sort of money in the public sector when you can’t justify high costs with high profits. If he had more experience, he would know this. Instead he will just run out of money sooner and then have to run the place on a skeleton staff which will be no fun for them and no fun for us. Budget control, the lack of which Ken was rightly castigated for, was never going to be Boris’ strong point. I’m just trying to work out what is.

Routemaster Buses only an aspiration: Hahaha! Of course they are and they should not be his number one priority!

So, the verdict?

To be honest, he’s not had much time to ruin it yet and, veering back into party politics for a moment, my fears about the impact on a Tory revival have been realised. I wonder what those Lib Dems going around telling us how Boris was going to be the more liberal are feeling now, when the first thing he does is ban something?

Still, when my partner and I were walking across Trafalgar Square the other Sunday morning we looked at the Africa Day stage being set up and thought about how funding for cultural events such as this would be quietly dropped, just like funding for environmental schemes in the capital will no doubt be reduced. No big press conference, fanfare there. No doubt to pay the bills of his super duper transition team. It will be a decidedly different London. In fairness, I have castigated Ken Livingstone on live TV for being just a Trafalgar Square Mayor, but that was more for his focus on inner London boroughs at the expense of the suburbs, but I did enjoy the events that took place at Trafalgar Square.

One of my big interests in London though, is policing. And I am a big, big fan of community policing. I went to the commendation ceremony of my Safer Neighbourhood team the other day and wondered, along with a senior policeman whether funding for community policing would continue. We both hoped so. But whilst the number of police and PCSOs is important, as is parents and the wider communities responsibility for the behaviour of our children, one key factor in dealing with young people’s crime and unsafe streets is something for young people to do. My experience of living in a Tory borough is that whilst, they have done very well in clearing up graffiti, they seem to have made it their life’s work to reduce funding for young people’s facilities and activities. The link between bored and disillusioned young people and crime is clear; can Boris be the first Conservative, with the help of his Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis, to realise that it is better prevent young people from committing crime than just punish them when it’s all too late?

My darling dog Seth

I have been rather quiet since the May elections. No, it is not because I have gone into an almighty sulk because Boris is the Mayor of London but that I have been looking after my darling dog Seth. Although I had known for some weeks that Seth had an inoperable tumour (the first two he's had been removed), it wasn't until three weeks ago that we both had to admit that things weren't going to be the same and despite numerous rallies, the trend from then on would be downward.

We finally had to ask the vet to come over and put him to sleep this Saturday just gone. The house is so quiet and empty it is almost unbearable.

My darling dog Seth was with me for 9 years and for all but about 18 months of that time it has been him and me. He is part of what makes my home, home.

I could tell you the whole story of my wonderful, remarkable, unique dog but that would be indulgent. But I have found in the last three weeks whilst I have been looking after him I have been unable to write.

Pet bereavement is a much underestimated phenomenon and whilst I have had numerous other pets, Seth has been my longest and closest pal. His physical presence in the house was enormous; not because he was particularly big but because he was interested in everything and loved company. So you would find him at your elbow, supervising anything you were doing. He inveigled his way into the affections of my partner, my parents, friends, his dog sitter, various work men, decorators, kitchen fitters, gardeners, cleaning ladies and even the Ocado delivery man. I used to lie in bed and feel comforted by the synchronised breathing of the dog at the side of my bed and my partner beside me.

This loneliness will pass, I know but in the meantime, for all those of you who have ever lost a loved pet, I commend Blemie's Will to you, via the EASE website, written by Eugene O'Neill to comfort his wife.

Nick Clegg starts to tell our story

Today, I have starting to see evidence of a real narrative being built up by Nick. As the Free Think Blog mentions, Nick has been all over the papers like a rash today. And in his article in The Independent at last creates a story that will resonate with voters!

Hoo-bloody-ray!!!

It has been some time since the bloggers interview of Nick Clegg that I attended; I have to be truth had other things on my mind since then and have struggled to give the interview and my write up of it the attention it deserves. However, as I sit here in the eye of a storm, I find myself able to peruse and ingest the activity of Mr Clegg over the last few days and comment upon it. Almost always a pleasure, as I am only outdone in my regard for Nick Clegg by my Mum, who isn’t even a Lib Dem, but has been wittering on about him since 2005. And, she made Newport Library on the Isle of Wight order Barack Obama’s autobiographyat least 18 months ago, so she knows how to pick a winner, mark my words.

As anyone who has read the blog of the erudite, discerning and perceptive Neil Stockley will know that if we are to succeed in the breakthrough that Nick wants we need more than just the best policies in the country. We already have those and they haven’t always translated into electoral success. Key to winning will be Nick’s ability to define an appealing narrative, embody it, fit his actions to it and for us to back it up with a substantial range of policies. Well, big tick for us, as da-daaah: we already have the best policies in the country! So, it’s up to Nick to do his bit.

When I asked Nick about this at the bloggers interview he didn’t provide me with the answer that I was looking for. Well, not to start with. To be fair (or unfair) I wasn’t expecting him to give me the perfect answer, because if he had then that would’ve meant he understood what a narrative was and why it was so important and would therefore be doing it and I wouldn’t have to ask what our narrative was!! You can breathe again now. And I could have asked other pet questions such as what are you going to do about the dearth of women on the Lib Dem green benches (even the ones we’ve got are all but invisible at PMQs) and what are we going to do to court women voters?

So, really I wasn’t asking him what our narrative was but rather more obliquely: do you understand what a narrative is and what are your ideas for what ours should be? With a subtitle of: and isn’t it about time you got your head around it and gave us one? Because how hard is it? And have you not read Neil’s paper on Liberal Democrats and narrative?

I have been told that I’m not always as patient as I could be.

Well, Nick started off well: it’s about being a liberal, changing the way we do politics, lots to do with power both in politics and in business and then he proceeded to drift far, far away from the path I was willing him down and started to provide me with a list! A list! Aaaarghhhh!

Tempted as I was, sitting next to him, to fling my notepad on the floor and give a Chinese burn for answering a question on narrative with a list, I interrupted his flow allowing him, patiently, one more item on this ever increasing list. He kindly demurred and let me rephrase my question. Did he think using words like liberal was enough of an: here I stopped speaking and mimed pulling at the heart strings ‘emotional pull?’ he completed for me.

Yes.

Probably not, was the answer and this is where his response changed and he got back on the path and I was able to stop scowling and start smiling at him again.

Nick was clear that whatever else the next election is about, it will be about change, much in the same way as the 1997 election. The political challenge will be for us to lead the definition of that change with more authenticity that the Tories. Phew!

And today, Nick started to do it in a way that I thought was not just convincing but sustainable in both his Policy Exchange Speech and his article in the Independent. In his article on Democracy he starts off by outline the ‘crisis in which the public feel ever more alienated from, and angry towards, the political class’. That political class is out of touch they:

"read and watch the cottage industry of views spawned by the commentators. But Westminster politics has become a minority sport. Apathy, frustration and cynicism have won the day.

But people do still care. There’s nothing more disingenuous that politicians claiming that the public doesn’t care, that a culture of contentment has rendered people indifferent.”

He goes on to describe the people who come to his town hall meetings:

“…they shout because it’s personal, because it matters, because it’s part of their real life. The contrast with the contrived anger and noise in the House of Commons speaks volumes. It shows people do care. They do care about the world they live in. They just don’t care about party politics".

He then identifies that we are at a turning point and that it’s up to all of us to grab the opportunity:

“In 10 years' time we will look back at this moment and either see it as the beginning of a real, vital transformation in our politics, or a missed opportunity that killed off public faith in politics for a generation or more.

There are deep forces at work: social, cultural and political identities have become fluid as old political ideologies are replaced by a web of religious, ethnic and demographic distinctions between people that no longer fit into the rigid mould of two-party politics”.

And which path should we take?

“Overturning the vested interests that protect the status quo is always tricky. But I am certain that once it begins, and people see that change really is achievable, the tide will be unstoppable. People have been locked out of politics for too long. Cynicism and apathy have taken root. Self interest and a lack of imagination blinker the political class. But change is possible – and inescapable if we want to rediscover the democracy that once made this country great”.

This is more like it! This is just the ‘story’, the emotional bit, which I’ve pulled out from the article which is littered with some of the policy initiatives that would support this narrative. But it is these emotional bits that are important. People generally vote with their emotions, not after having done a compare and contrast against all the available party manifestos. Let’s face it, when Vote Match in the Mayoral lections told you to vote for someone else, other than Brian Paddick, did you?

First you must grab their attention. If you don’t have the polices, you won’t keep their attention (which is what will happen to Cameron, if he’s not careful) but all the policies in the world won’t get you in power if you can’t engage the electorate in the manner they wish to be engaged in.

Nick embodies this dissenting individual narrative very well himself from the ‘cacti episode’ on a school trip to his determination not to carry an ID card. He embodies that idea that he is one of us not part of the Westminster bubble, by being, well, refreshingly normal. It’s one of the things that made me not just vote for him as leader but give up a days fee to drive him around south west London during his leadership campaign. He embodies the listening through his town hall meetings.

So, the narrative I think he’s in the process of defining goes a bit like this:

The political classes, Brown and Cameron are out of touch and only interested in themselves. Whilst all around people are voicing their concerns nobody will listen. But me, I will listen; I do listen. We have an opportunity to move away from this rotten, self serving, two party politics and get back to listening to what people not the Westminster bubble want. Take that opportunity and we will go back to being the great country that we once were but vote in either the Tories or Labour and you won’t get anywhere.

It probably could do with refining and I’m not sure how it fits into Neil’s narrative archetypes but I am today, am really rather happy with this. I still need a bit more on how wonderful it’s going to be in this once again great country of ours but this is a real start.

One other bit of positive narrative embodiment from today? Well, an article like this in the Sun, is not going to do our Nick any harm at all!!

A small reminder of the good that political correctness has done...

Too often my experience of the Internet is just too much like this:

Courtesy of XKCD

However every now and then, I come across the post that reminds me that occasionally there are right thinking people out there!! This post from Simon Jerran at 'I don't wish to spread any gossip, but...' is one of those. He picked up on this rant, from Stuart Lee on the Radio 4 programme 'Heresy', at the 84% of his audience who clearly have had it up to there with political correctness.

"It really worries me that 84% of this audience agrees with that statement, because the kind of people that say “political correctness gone mad” are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action to attack minorities or people that they disagree with. I’m of an age that I can see what a difference political correctness has made. When I was four years old, my grandfather drove me around Birmingham, where the Tories had just fought an election campaign saying, “if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour,” and he drove me around saying, “this is where all the niggers and the coons and the jungle bunnies live.” And I remember being at school in the early 80s and my teacher, when he read the register, instead of saying the name of the one Asian boy in the class, he would say, “is the black spot in,” right? And all these things have gradually been eroded by political correctness, which seems to me to be about an institutionalised politeness at its worst. And if there is some fallout from this, which means that someone in an office might get in trouble one day for saying something that someone was a bit unsure about because they couldn’t decide whether it was sexist or homophobic or racist, it’s a small price to pay for the massive benefits and improvements in the quality of life for millions of people that political correctness has made. It’s a complete lie that allows the right, which basically controls media now, and international politics, to make people on the left who are concerned about the way people are represented look like killjoys. And I’m sick, I’m really sick– 84% of you in this room that have agreed with this phrase, you’re like those people who turn around and go, “you know who the most oppressed minorities in Britain are? White, middle-class men.” You’re a bunch of idiots.

'Nuff said.

Waiting

So, it looks like the blogosphere is calling it for Boris. How very depressing! All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not Labour...because not only have they lost the country, it looks like they've lost London. Not just unfortunate but rather careless, wouldn't you say?

So, I'm here, at the Sky News studio dropped off a little early by the car and just trying to contemplate what a potential Tory resurgence will feel like, because make no mistake if Boris wins tonight like everybody thinks he will it is far more significant for the Tories than a Livingstone win would have been for Labour. The last time the Tories put Labour out of power was in 1979. I remember it well because it was also the day I lost my red mickey mouse watch.

Still, it could have been worse as we, yes, we the Lib Dems did a lot better than expected; as I write we've got 29 extra councillors and depending on who you ask we have maintained or increased our vote share. Not bad and probably quite irritating for the other two parties who would probably have wanted to squeeze us out of existence. Well, they didn't! Ha! And we've got back Sheffield!

Back on Sky.com News tonight...

I'm back on Sky.com News tonight with two different bloggers this time: Shane Greer and Jag Singh. We're going to be covering the local election results and the producers are hoping that the Mayor and London Assembly election results are going to be annouced whilst we're on air.

As I have one of the world's most expressive faces ever it will be really easy to tell what I think before I get close to opening my mouth: relief, joy or absolute horror!

I've been trying to pull myself together from a feeling of impending doom for London and write a post, but I'm struggling. It's not just the thought of Boris in charge, it's all those really smug Tories out and about again. Gah!