CentreRight

Tim Roll-Pickering: The Alternative Vote in Australia – what does it produce?

By Tim Roll-Pickering, who is a research student at Queen Mary, University of London.

The current Australian general election will attract more attention in the UK than usual because Australia uses the Alternative Vote (AV, known as “Preferential Voting” down under) voting system. Many will be looking to Australia with an eye to our forthcoming referendum and already people are asking what outcomes the system produces.

It’s important to stress that no two countries’ politics are exactly alike. Australia has a few features in their wider party system that differ from the UK, which can produce alternative outcomes including:

• In federal elections it is compulsory to number all candidates to cast a valid vote (at state level there are several variants; the UK is likely to be offered the “optional preferencing” system where only one candidate needs to be numbered)
• Voting is compulsory
• All candidates who poll above the 4% deposit threshold receive state funding
• There is no significant third-force party in the House of Representatives, in part because third-force parties focus on the Senate (elected by PR)
• With the recent collapse of the Australian Democrats there is no significant centrist party
• The conservatives in Australia are formally two parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, but for most purposes they present themselves to the electorate as a joint entity called “the Coalition”

Nevertheless it is possible to see how the AV experience in Australia has met up to some of the points often debated here including.

Can one party can get most votes and another most seats?
This has happened in two of the seventeen UK elections since the war (1951 & Feb 1974), an 11% failure rate. Once it resulted in a hung parliament, the other in a majority government.

For Australia the comparable figure is not the number of first preferences a party receives but the “Two Party Preferred” (2PP) vote which takes the ballot papers all the way to a voter’s preference between the Labor Party and the Coalition. Of the twenty-five Australian elections since the war, no less than five have seen one party win the majority of the 2PP vote and another the majority of the seats (1954, 1961, 1969, 1990 & 1998), an astounding failure rate of 20%.

This phenomenon has also happened at a number of state elections and there have been calls for seats to be drawn in such a way that on a uniform swing the effect does not recur. But swings are often not uniform and so it can be a futile effort. The South Australian state parliament has implemented this measure; yet in this year’s state election Labor won a majority of seats despite trailing the Liberals by 3.2% of the vote.

Can extremists get elected?
We’re often told that the Alternative Vote will do an even better job than First Past The Post of keeping out extremist parties because all the other voters will transfer against them. Well at its height the One Nation party, the nearest Australia has had to a BNP, won no less than eleven seats in the 1998 Queensland election (using the “optional preferencing” version), five of them where they were outpolled on first preferences. What destroyed One Nation as a force wasn’t the voting system but the way the mainstream parties responded to it.

Does one side have a partisan advantage?
Yes, and which side has changed over time. AV was introduced in 1918 (by a conservative government for partisan reasons) and for the next sixty odd years it tended to advantage the conservative parties. This was both because the Coalition parties could simultaneously contest the same seats and jointly fight Labor, but also because for a time the Democratic Labor Party, who broke away from Labor over Communist influences, used their influence to encourage their voters to transfer against Labor.

However since 1980 all that has changed. In the last three decades preferential voting has delivered the Coalition just 5 seats where they trailed Labor on first preferences, and Labor 61. (See Antony Green: Preferential Voting in Australia for more details.) At the last election Liberal Prime Minister John Howard lost his own seat despite polling the most first preferences. Some of this is down to changes in the nature of smaller parties – the right leaning Democratic Labor Party’s place has been taken first by the centrist Australian Democrats and now by the left-wing Greens.

I’ve only been able to skim through the details in this piece but I hope it answers some of the questions I’ve seen people raising so far.

The 10 worst examples of dodgy reasoning in Tim Yeo's new book

Last night, I attended the launch of the new book from Tim Yeo MP "Green Gold: The Case For Raising Our Game On Climate Change", published by the Tory Reform Group.  It was reported in the media yesterday and is available for download here.  The book is a bit of a masterpiece of green conventional wisdom and almost entirely detached from reality.  Here are my ten favourite examples:

In praise of Colombia

This morning, I had the pleasure of attending a reception at the House of Lords hosted by Ulster Unionist peer Lord Laird to celebrate the bicentenary Colombia's independence.

Aside from the poetic tributes from the assembled dignitaries to historic figures such as Simon Bolivar and Francisco de Paula Santander, the celebration had little to do with the country's past and far more to do with its present. 

Colombia has a lot to be proud of.

Under President Álvaro Uribe, the country has been turned from a lawless basket-case where political decisions were take on the basis of the whims of crime bosses to a largely-peaceful nation committed to principles of liberal democracy.

During the term of Uribe's Presidency, 51,000 FARC guerrilla paramilitaries have been demobilised leading to a 45% drop in homicides and 75% fall in terrorist attacks.  While more work is needed to do to eliminate FARC, large parts of Colombia which had been terrorised by the group's activities for decades are now at peace.

On a regional level, the Uribe administration has pursued a pro-democracy policy which puts to shame the feeble efforts of Western nations.  Far from joining the capitulation of the likes of Brazilian President Lula to figures such as Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, his government has stood firm in its commitment to human rights and refusal to join the chorus of populist rants against big business and the United States.

Because of this, inward investment to the country has grown threefold since 2003 with average quarterly growth rates of in excess of 4%.  According to World Bank figures, Colombia is now in the top 14% of nations globally in terms of purchasing power.  Crucially, the country has eschewed the economically protectionist talk of many of its near neighbours; opening its markets to foreign investment by lowering taxes and brushing away the molasses-like bureaucracy which holds back so many South American countries.

Barred from running for a third term, Uribe will hand the keys to the Presidential Palace to former Finance and Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos in just under three weeks.  Elected on a clear pledge to continue Uribe's policies, he can be expected to provide something that is so rarely a positive thing in politics: more of the same.

William Hague is of course right to focus Britain's diplomatic efforts on strengthening ties with developing markets in India and China.  I do hope, however, that time might also be found to forge meaningful partnerships with the governments of countries like Colombia whose agendas are every part Western-looking - and every bit Conservative.

Today, we Conservatives should all join in saying: "¡Viva Colombia, viva la libertad!  

Monetary bingeing and the spirit of the British people

At The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard calls for a further extension to our monetary binge:

Tight fiscal policy offset by ultra-loose money is the only option for Europe, the US, and Japan.

However, at The Cobden Centre, Professor Kevin Dowd says that calls for further monetary expansion are cuckoo, and James Tyler, Chief Executive of Tyler Capital, describes the article as Monetarist whitewash.

Contemporary economic thinking takes too many aggregates, amongst other faults (see for example Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, pp 519-583): monetarists ignore the structure of production. A consequence is policy advice which is bound to cause worse problems later.

As Hayek said in his Nobel lecture (and by "inflation" he means an increase in the money supply, not the consequent affect on prices):

The continuous injection of additional amounts of money at points of the economic system where it creates a temporary demand which must cease when the increase of the quantity of money stops or slows down, together with the expectation of a continuing rise of prices, draws labour and other resources into employments which can last only so long as the increase of the quantity of money continues at the same rate - or perhaps even only so long as it continues to accelerate at a given rate. What this policy has produced is not so much a level of employment that could not have been brought about in other ways, as a distribution of employment which cannot be indefinitely maintained and which after some time can be maintained only by a rate of inflation which would rapidly lead to a disorganisation of all economic activity. The fact is that by a mistaken theoretical view we have been led into a precarious position in which we cannot prevent substantial unemployment from re-appearing; not because, as this view is sometimes misrepresented, this unemployment is deliberately brought about as a means to combat inflation, but because it is now bound to occur as a deeply regrettable but inescapable consequence of the mistaken policies of the past as soon as inflation ceases to accelerate.

As Kevin writes:

The reason the economy is doing so badly is because the banking system is still broken, and the economy will continue to do badly until the banking system is properly fixed. Some of us have been hammering on about this for years.

I am put very much in mind of a quote from Churchill:

I must point out ... that the British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst, and like to be told that they are very likely to get much worse in the future and must prepare themselves for further reverses.

We should tell the British people that the state of the economy is worse than they think and that it is going to get worse yet when, inevitably, our monetary binge ends. A compounding factor is that the vast majority of economic commentators lack an adequate theory of capital, and so they will tend to give the wrong advice, even as things deteriorate. People must prepare themselves for future reverses.

The good news is that the intellectual climate is changing. For example, on Thursday, the Institute of Economic Affairs is holding an event, Why today’s political class needs Ludwig von Mises, with speakers including yours truly.

For those who think economics is too complex, a good place to start is Peter Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes: Two Tales of the Economy. More detail may be found in The Cobden Centre's Primer.

In the battle of the burka, choose freedom

Few people have been more passionately opposed to radical Islamism on these pages than I have been. I have written a whole catalogue of posts over the years, quoting the likes of Melanie Phillips, Michael Nazir-Ali, Douglas Murray, Ed Husain and others. I have done so for one very simple reason: because I am passionate about freedom, and I regard radical Islamism as one of the greatest threats to liberal democracy of our time. The other, I might add, is militant secularism.

I work for a human rights organisation which specialises in religious freedom. Yes, we are a Christian organisation and much of the work we do is on behalf of persecuted Christians. But we campaign for religious freedom for all, and I have personally spent many hours working with and for Rohingya Muslims in Burma and Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Some of my colleagues are very active on behalf of the Baha'is, Tibetans and Falun Gong. I think the fact that we are an explicitly Christian organisation championing, so proactively, religious freedom for all is something to be celebrated.

In my spare time, I serve as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party's Human Rights Commission. We have just completed an inquiry into international religious freedom, and will be launching a report soon.

In other words, freedom, liberal democracy, basic human rights, and particularly religious freedom, are the values which fill virtually every minute of every day for me. And those values are threatened by radical Islamism. Not, I repeat for those who still need the caveats even though they get repetitive, all Islam: simply a strand of Islam that is radical, militant and either preaches or practices hatred, violence and subjugation of women, gays, non-Muslims and other Muslims who disagree.

For those very reasons, I am strongly against banning the burka - or, for that matter, going in the Swiss direction of banning minarets. How can we possibly speak for persecuted Christians, Baha'is, Ahmadiyyas or, for that matter, atheists, in Muslim-majority countries, if we impose, through legislation, a blanket ban on the burka and impose strict controls on what people can and cannot wear? If we are to effectively champion the values that we hold dear and which radical Islamism opposes and seeks to defeat, we have to be consistent. Furthermore, if we are to empower voices of moderation within Islam, we do ourselves and them no good at all by imposing bans on dress and refusing to talk to veiled women. I was recently in Indonesia, where I developed partnerships with several amazing, courageous Muslim civil society groups who are at the forefront of counter-extremism and promoting religious pluralism and freedom in that country. How could they, who are risking their lives for our values from within Islam, trust us if we impose blanket bans on items of clothing?

Money and old rope

If you thought things are bad in Britain over the EU, with Parliament lumbered with having to approve the External Action Service, pity poor Estonia. Tallinn’s government are rushing headlong into the fire, charging into the Eurozone with unparalleled and unfathomable zealotry, even as 2009 entrant Slovakia is getting the chilliest of feet over bail out liabilities.

And yet, as a remarkable poll shows, if there were a referendum today over Estonia giving up its national currency, then the No side would be ten points ahead with another ten per cent undecided.

Such arrogance amongst the political elite is not new. We saw plenty of it during the ratification of the EU Constitution. The more one sees of it, the more such authoritarian paternalism is proven to be inescapably symptomatic of the EU form of government.

Now, perhaps someone from the Treasury can explain what they were doing on 13 July in the Council of Ministers endorsing this? Having hoped beyond hope for the Czechs and the Poles to bail us out and delay signing up to the Lisbon Treaty, a statement of faith in basic democratic principles might have been justified.

Why France, and Philip Hollobone, are wrong on the Burka Ban

I bow to nobody in my admiration for Roger Helmer but on this topic I'm afraid that I must respectfully disagree.

I have no doubt that to Roger and many others the burka is a symbol of repression and that they find it repellant. However, I also have no doubt that there are many women in this country who wish to wear the burka of their own volition and their beliefs are equally firmly held. The former are free to think as they wish. The latter are free to dress as they wish.

As a matter of fact, I dislike the connotations of the burka myself - but I regard my own attitude on the clothes others choose to wear as a matter relevant only for my own views and outlooks, not as something on which the state should legislate. If actual abuse or repression happens somewhere, then the state should find evidence of it and prosecute it. Otherwise, it's none of the business of the authorities what people wear.

So I agree with Damian Green - I think that to allow the state to govern dress would be to yield too much power to the state.

People seem insistent on going beyond such simple statements of principle, drawing comparisons with costume in other areas. If that appeals:

• Wearing a swastika might mean that one is a Nazi, or that one is in a production of Cabaret, or that one is a Balinese Hindu. In any case, I wouldn't ban it.To say so does not mean that I approve of Nazism (I don't), or like Cabaret (I do) or have a view on Balinese Hinduism (I don't).

• Wearing one's trousers with the top around one's mid-thigh certainly, I think, means that one's an idiot. But the government should not ban that either.

There is or should be a big difference between judgments we are entitled to make ourselves in our lives - intellectually, morally, emotionally - and what the state can decide, legally. This is one issue that falls under the former, not the latter.

The government should not be able to tell us what to wear.

Alex Deane is the Director of Big Brother Watch

CentreRight's own Mark Wallace has some very good analysis on this elsewhere

Big Society could be really... Big

Today David Cameron launches the first stage of the Big Society. This will see help for museum volunteering, encourage recycling and enable communities to buy their own pubs. Predictably the idea has been attacked at being "cover for cuts" by a Labour Party that increasingly has little positive to say.

Yet the Big Society idea could make a real difference. Where is it written that giving power to the people has to be small scale? These pilots are a good idea, yet I hope we will see the scale expanded in the near future. There is no reason why a project cannot run into the hundreds of millions of pounds.

This is why I have tabled a Big Society project for the Port of Dover to become a people's port. The port is worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Labour were planning to sell it off to the French or whoever for a quick buck in the car boot sale. Yet the community are saying if the Government wants to sell it, they want to be able to buy it. The plan I have put together is costed, funded and would ensure the port works better with the community and the ferry companies at Dover. This could be the Big, Big Society in action.

Why France, and Philip Hollobone, are right on the Burka Ban

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Damian Green thinks a ban on the burka (burqa) would be “un-British”.  Maybe he should reflect that the burka itself is rather un-British to start with.

As an instinctive libertarian, I must admit that my first thought was to oppose any ban on the burka.  We want the government off our backs, not telling us what to wear.

But the libertarian argument works both ways.  There certainly are Muslim women who choose voluntarily to wear the burka, perhaps as an expression of identity, or of faith, or perhaps out of a misplaced sense of modesty.  On the other hand there is good evidence that many Muslim women wear the burka involuntarily, because of cultural, or religious, or peer pressure, or indeed because they are forced to do so by their husbands or other male relatives.  So a burka ban would be an imposition on the first group, but would liberate the second.

We already accept social or legal constraints on dress in many circumstances.  No one, I suspect, man or woman, would choose to enter a church, or a mosque, or indeed a court of law, stripped to the waist.  Even if some new religion emerged which held it to be a religious duty to go bare-chested, such people would not be welcome, or allowed, in churches.

I have often visited mosques and Hindu temples, and have been perfectly happy to take off my shoes.  I don’t see that as a restriction of my right to choose my own footwear.  It is merely a courtesy to my hosts.  Back in 1984, I visited the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Ceylon.  I was wearing typical Englishman-Abroad baggy shorts, which I considered perfectly modest, but I was required to rent a sarong to wear over my shorts and bare calves before I was allowed to go in.  Again, I had no problem with that – indeed I rather admired the entrepreneurial spirit of local people who had parleyed Buddhist modesty into a nice little earner, renting sarongs to the tourists.

Much needed health reforms will positively challenge private hospitals and trade unions

In terms of the anxiety and concern felt by Wycombe constituents, no other issue compares to the future of our hospital and local health care. That's why, as MP for Wycombe, the NHS is my top local priority. 

As you can see by searching our local paper for stories relating to my work in relation to our hospital, the current structure of the NHS manufactures discontent and ill-will. We simply must move beyond the present cycle of despairing powerlessness amongst local people, including clinicians. 

That's why I'm backing Andrew Lansley's health reforms. 

I am delighted that the coalition is planning to empower patients by introducing what amounts to a shadow-voucher system. By enabling patients to choose their general practitoners and then routing the vast majority of NHS funds through their hands, we will finally be able to reduce bureaucracy by scrapping Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts. 

I am also pleased that the government will return NHS hospitals into a rich and diverse tapestry of independence. In the future, no one in this country should have to go into any hospital owned or directed by the state. Whether for-profit or not-for-profit, mutual, worker co-operative or charity, all our hospitals, clinics and care homes must be set free from political control: they must reside in a greatly expanded and genuine independent sector. 

These organisations should then be free to raise money commercially, free to reap the rewards of delivering excellent service to patients, and freed from the shackles of the Treasury. In the future, not only should all hospitals be allowed to raise investment and capital as they see fit from non-governmental sources, but the caps on their private work should likewise be removed. 

For too long, high-quality independent provision has been the sole preserve of the well-heeled and those able to afford exclusivity. For too long, private hospitals have exploited high margins as a result of the manifest failings of state hospitals. It is, as we have said, time for change.

With Nurses for Reform and other campaigners, I believe that national collective pay bargaining has run its course and should be abandoned. Alongside denationalising NHS hospitals, I therefore urge the government to similarly encourage a more vibrant and open labour market for the benefit of all doctors, nurses and other health workers. No one in healthcare should have their professionalism and integrity undermined by one-size-fits-all politically-decreed pay scales. Nor should remuneration be imposed and held back at regional levels. To properly value doctors, nurses and other health workers, remuneration must be set at proper commercial levels and this will only happen in a more open, dynamic and responsive market. 

Employment contracts should be a matter for each independent employer and their staff – not the government or any of its ‘appointees’. Indeed, it is in this context that trade unions should proactively push for, and embrace, this new world of welcome opportunity. Gone will be the tedious days of top-down state direction, beer and sandwiches at number ten, and endless, counter-productive, national strikes. 

Today, unions should know that, to be relevant, they must provide representation and engagement in a new world of work which will increasingly be built on collective self-help through worker ownership, co-operatives and mutuals. In some cases, unions already provide, not just legal advice, mortgage discounts and so on, but also private health cash plans: this should continue and develop in a rediscovery of the labour movement's tradition of mutuality, a rediscovery which can be expected to increase membership.

When Tony Blair first sought support for independent foundation trusts nearly a decade ago, he was vehemently attacked by an unholy alliance that included elements of the Labour Party and the trade union left plus new-found friends in Britain’s private hospitals. Riven with a fear of putting power in the hands of patients, professionals and consumers, the private hospital sector in particular encouraged the Labour left and the Conservative Party variously to oppose Blair’s legislation. 

And so it came to pass that Gordon Brown watered down the foundation trust bill while the Conservatives opposed it on the grounds that “it did not go far enough”. 

Now, for the sake of patients and health workers alike, our trades unions and health privateers must find a more positive way forward, not fall back to reactionary opposition. That means not only supporting the government, but also joining me in urging the coalition to go further. For if we strive for real openness and diversity, not only will we push more resource to the front line of healthcare but, crucially, we will open up independent provision for the benefit of all. 

It is to this end that I welcome the government’s recent white paper on the future of the National Health Service and I urge the trades unions and private hospitals to do the same. Anything less than full support will be bad for our unions and Britain’s private hospital bosses. For it will further compound their challenges and put them squarely on the side of history’s losers. British people deserve better. 

If we get these reforms right and if they are sufficiently radical, then we can re-engineer the NHS as a key funder of healthcare, delivering more and higher quality care where it matters. We can also obtain better pay and conditions for those who provide care, skill and long-term dedication. If we are bold, we can end the present cycle of local disempowerment and staff disenchantment. 

It is in this sense that I believe these much-needed health reforms will positively challenge private hospitals and trade unions. 

People deserve health care which meets their needs and aspirations. It is time government provided the right environment. Health professionals, unions and management, right across the spectrum of health provision, should seize the moment.

An idle Sunday evening thought

A little less than a month ago, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (America's most senior military officer) said publicly that

the US national debt posed the biggest threat to its national security - bigger even than that posed by al-Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction.

It got lost in the tsunami of coverage about McChrystal's dismissal, but it's a striking remark, isn't it?

What do you think of it, and - making the necessary alterations - do you think it fits the situation in the UK?

The world must support Israel, as if she goes down, we all go down

One of the most astonishing - and destructive - political phenomena in recent years has been hostility to the state of Israel and all she stands for. If it were just confined to the extreme left - and extreme Islamism - that would be bad enough. But this is a virus that has spread beyond the fringes to much of the soft left, to sections of the media and even the chattering class’s dinner party circuit.

We have become accustomed to see so called “Palestinian Solidarity” marches around Hyde Park, with demonstrators carrying banners reading “we are all Hezbollah now”. We have seen the likes of George Galloway salute Saddam Hussein and the Syrian Assad leadership. We have watched the populist left, such as Ken Livingstone, invite and embrace Islamists like Sheikh Qaradawi (a man who provides the “intellectual justification for suicide bombers”) to the United Kingdom. These people represent a long standing strain of the left. The far left, which for years justified Stalinism, Castroism and appeasement of communism, has now come to support totalitarian Islam. Call it conviction politics if you will - the extreme left’s extremism knows no bounds.

But when virulent anti-Israel politics reaches mainstream society - particularly amongst the media and Labour backbenchers (to be fair, a view not shared by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair), when our broadcast media feeds us a daily diet of partisan coverage on the Middle East, now is the time for free-thinking people on the right to stand up and be counted. It is time to the make the case for Israel.

Israel, in her sixty years’ existence, has been at the front line of freedom. It has faced down dictatorships, secular terrorism and now extremist Islamism. It’s very existence is under threat from Iran’s fundamentalist regime, which is close to having nuclear weapon capability. When Israel faced a daily barrage of suicide bombing from Islamists (courtesy of Hamas and Islamic Jihad), few understood what this signified: a worldwide assault on freedom.

After September 11 - and when extreme British Islamists organised a wave of suicide bombing in London, many on the right woke up to the battle that was being waged. The Islamists who attempt to destroy Israel, are not just waging a battle against the Jewish state, they are trying to destroy Western values as a whole. Eliminate Israel and you wipe out a country that is in the vanguard against totalitarianism - and encourage the whole of the Middle East to be engulfed under fanaticism. The modest steps towards liberalisation made by some Arab countries would be extinguished overnight. Of course, the mainstream left will argue that the Palestinian issue is the reason for Islamist fundamentalism.

What Not To Wear

There's an area of Brighton beach, at the Kemptown end, just before the Marina, set aside for what the  discreet signs refer to, in oblique British fashion, as 'naturist bathing'. By which they mean: bathing in the nude. No, I haven't bathed there, not yet anyway, but swimming with nothing on is pretty wonderful. In fact I'd prefer always to swim without clothes, because the more you think about the reasons that 'clothing' (a small strip of nylon, for men; two small strips, for women) is insisted upon, the more daft the naked prohibition seems. In the case of women, very little is left to the imagination with a bikini top - so why bother? And in the case of men, either very little or an awful lot is left to the imagination with speedo trunks - so again, why bother?

Well, we bother, of course, or, rather, it is bothered about, because a handful of our external sexual organs are deemed to be just that, I suppose - sexual. But this can't be the whole reason. Your face is surely the most sexual of your organs, and we don't cover that up (you may now predict where this post is going). Or is the prohibition rooted in some sort of Freudian distaste? That we don't care to be reminded of the dual purposes these organs perform? But my hands perform a heck of a lot more functions than that which lies beneath my speedos; yet rarely, since the end of the Edwardian era, have we found it distasteful to see one another's hands in public. In any case, I long ago gave up the joyless writhing that a full evasion of seaside nudity incurs (struggling into a pair of trunks underneath a beach towel while lying on my back on a pebbly beach: this was not my seaside dream) and now just get changed in full view of anyone who cares to watch; so for about 15 seconds a swim I'm breaking the prohibition and do the Full Monty. I'm sort-of (but not hugely) glad to report that so far I've not caused any riots.

So. All this to point out that our rules on clothing are arbitrary, and seem to arise from the culture we inhabit, rather than via legislative edict (I think the laws follow the custom here, something which is comfortable for a Tory, but would strike Labour politicians of the Blair-Brown era as almost completely insane). We instinctively recognise this, as Brighton proves, because while most people prefer to bathe in speedos and bikinis, we don't forbid the setting aside of an area of the beach where nudity is permitted to occur. (If nudity were wrong per se, this surely wouldn't happen). And however strongly I wish that most swimming was carried out in the buff, even I wouldn't expect to visit the post office whilst naked without provoking a reaction from everyone else. ('Daddy, what's a post office?' That's another story).

Max Wind-Cowie: Tories shouldn’t fear Turkey's accession to the EU

By Max Wind-Cowie, Head of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos

Poor old Philip Hollobone.  The MP for Kettering has been at the sharp end of a great deal of media attention over the past week.  His Private Member’s Bill on face-coverings has inspired much comment, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and today he has been rather pilloried in the Independent. The pros, cons and practicalities of a ban on the burkha have been discussed and debated exhaustively and I would have nothing to add to Conservative Home’s own Paul Goodman, whose wisdom on the matter should inform us all. 

But it is another of Mr. Hollobone’s attitudes that bothers me today – his resolute opposition to Turkish membership of the EU.  It bothers me because I think it is misplaced and, more importantly, because it is also unhelpful to conservative ideas about Europe and the EU.

In the Indy today he says that Turkish accession to the EU would be a ‘disaster’, citing his fears that we would see ‘hundreds of thousands, if not more than one million, Turks heading our way’. Let me attempt to allay that fear.  Britain had its hands burnt by mass Eastern European migration in the noughties but that was because of the incompetence of our former Government which, unlike virtually every comparable EU member state, refused to cap the numbers permitted to come here to work. 

It would be entirely feasible – and with precedence - for Britain to place stringent restrictions on the numbers of economic migrants we would accept from any new member-state.  These measures would require tough negotiation, but they are eminently doable, we shouldn’t allow the recklessness of the previous administration to tie the hands of our new Government.

But it is not simply a question of mitigating the potential damage of Turkish membership – there are genuinely good, conservative, positive reasons to support it. 

Of COURSE the BBC tax should be reduced - if it's to continue at all

I applaud Jeremy Hunt's signal that there is to be a reduction in the amount of money that the BBC is able to demand a amount from those who own televisions capable of receiving signals (whether they use them to watch the BBC or not). To my knowledge, regardless of economic conditions the licence fee has only ever gone up since it was introduced - also regardless of the fact that during the lifetime of the state broadcaster there has been a proliferation of provision that really, to my mind, makes the BBC tax an anachronism in the first place.

I think that the claims being made on the BBC's behalf (and widely broadcast by, ahem, the BBC) that the licence fee should be exempt are absurd. Those responsible for every other aspect of public life are required to make serious cuts in their budgets - who could possibly maintain in a plausible way that the BBC is uniquely different from everything else? And if anyone can make that argument, could they please try, rather than just blustering away about the supposed "quality" of output from the BBC, which is a notion that is - to my mind - open to serious challenge?

Having listened to Radio 4's PM Programme today, it is evident that the BBC's fascination with itself continues, along with a remarkable determination to drive up the news agenda the notion that the money it receives from us should be protected. The show had two uncritically pro-status quo advocates who got to make their statements entirely without rebuttal, and then the great John Whittingdale, who - as he stuck up for the proposition that perhaps the BBC might have to be treated like everything else - was inevitably grilled.

This is a narrow economic part of a wider debate about the future of our state broadcaster, and the those who maintain that the BBC's position should go unchanged look even more ridiculous than usual as a result of that narrowness. Consider the wider issues for a moment. Given the success of the market in providing broadcast content in... well, everywhere else, I question whether we need to have a state-funded broadcaster at all. Just try explaining to a friend from abroad that we have to pay this cash for our state broadcaster if you want to see how silly it is. Moreover, I think it a severe limitation of freedom of speech and expression in this country that, in order for me to receive the message of commercial broadcasters who wish me to receive that, for free (paid for by their advertising), I have to subsidise a different set of stations. I don't know why the BBC has this uniquely protected position, even within the world of the arts. Imagine if it existed in, say, the theatre; imagine that if you went to the box office and asked for tickets to La Boheme, you were told that you had to pay a fee to subsidise Cats at the theatre next door. "No!" you'd cry. "But it's a uniquely good cultural product," you'd be told. "I'm not going to see it!" says you. "Tough - pay anyway, or you can't go to the theatre - oh, and I know where you live - it's all in the database." Finally, I resent being forced to subsidise the propagation of a worldview and political agenda with which I disagree, given that I question the supposed political impartiality of the BBC - no, worse, I think that the BBC - which given its funding structure should be the most impartial of our broadcasters - is in fact the least. But perhaps all of that's a debate for the longer term. In the meantime, the BBC should certainly not be exempt from the general round of belt-tightening caused by Labour's absurd largesse.

I do NOT believe in a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats

Last night The Sun put out this on its Twitter feed:

The trouble with Twitter is that you only get 140 characters but in my Re-Tweeting (republishing) of The Sun's message I added: "None to answer Sun's ?". To spell it out: No chance of a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats.

I do not believe in a snap election and not just because opinion polls are volatile. I think Cameron and the Conservative party would (deservedly) suffer a big hit if they rushed out of the Coalition deal after promising to make it work.

Unfortunately the Evening Standard misread my Tweet and have just reported that I support a snap election - the precise opposite of my position.

The Evening Standard's Paul Waugh has written - in a piece headlined 'David Cameron acts to head off snap election challenge of Tory Right':

"A new YouGov/Sun poll today put the Conservatives on 43 per cent, Labour on 34 and the Lib-Dems on 15 per cent. One senior Right-winger, Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome.com, suggested: “What chance a snap election now to dump the Libs?”"

The Evening Standard has recognised their mistake and have promised to immediately correct their website but I fear it's too late for the print edition. 

Aggghhh.

 

Flagging spirits

The EU’s new diplomatic corps, the EEAS, has been pretty high profile over the past few days. First there was a Brussels vote in which Conservative MEPs were reportedly chivvied by William Hague. Then much the same happened in the Commons yesterday.

As I pointed out earlier in the week, the EEAS may have been the offspring (some might prefer ‘spawn’) of the Lisbon Treaty, and we may be lumbered with it in some form. But there is no reason to so joyfully skip around hand in hand with what is a longstanding, very real and very costly threat to the British national interest headed up by a quangonaut.

It is only really a footnote to the whole affair, but details released today on the TaxPayers’ Alliance website and acquired through FOI requests show the number of EU flags the FCO has been buying up to fly from its flagpoles. Recent events give deeper symbolism to this tiny detail. The Foreign Office needs to find itself again; and it can only achieve that through a radical shake up, to bring to the top those diplomats who have this country’s interests at heart - rather than those who see themselves as part of a pan-European civil service.

Cap and trade's dismal record

In 2007, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner wrote that many of the problems with climate change policy today are the result of the fact that:

"Kyoto was constructed by quick borrowing from past practice with other treaty regimes dealing with ozone, sulphur emissions and nuclear bombs"

Basically, world leaders were in a hurry to do something, anything on climate change.  But they didn't really know how to proceed.  So they looked at what had worked to address other problems that seemed similar.  Unfortunately, they didn't properly consider the unique place of CO₂ in modern industrial economies, and how that would undo their attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Ambitious targets and timetables agreed around the negotiating table were thought to have worked to cut nuclear weapons.  So we had ambitious targets for cuts like Britain's target of a 33 per cent cut by 2020 and an 80 per cent cut by 2050.  But of course cuts in nuclear stockpiles save governments money, are directly within their power and only need to be agreed and enforced between a far smaller set of countries to be effective.  By contrast the targets for cutting emissions meant enshrining aspirations to remake the economy, in a way no government knew how to achieve, in international treaties.  That was and is a sure fire recipe for lots of grandstanding and very little consideration of the practicalities.

Breaking News: 6 people who were wrong 10 years ago are still wrong

If you visit the BBC News website today, you'll see a headline that might well surprise you. 

"Business leaders say Britain should still join the Euro".

Wow. That's pretty worrying, given the disastrous impact that joining the single currency would have on Britain.

It's also pretty demoralising for those of us who have been campaigning hard to build up opposition to Euro membership. If after all the evidence that has been gathered and all the effort that has been put into making the case, business leaders are still in favour, then we have a big problem.

Or rather it would be worrying and it would be demoralising if it was actually true. 

When you read the full story, it turns out the headline is simply, for want of a better word, a lie.

"Business leaders" suggests a number of things. First and foremost it leads the reader to think of business organisations like the Confederation of British Industry or the Institute of Directors. But it's neither of them.

Failing that, then surely the headline "Business leaders say Britain should still join the Euro" refers to a survey of senior business people? Nope.

So who on earth are these leaders who make up such an influential cohort.

Well, there are, er, six of them. Yes - just six. And "business leader" can apparently include people who were important ten years ago but have since retired.

Even worse, the story was based on an utterly biased survey of just eight people, all of whom were chosen specifically because they were high profile cheerleaders for the single currency in the past.

This is not a survey of business leaders at all, it is a ring round of eight Pro-Euro business people.

Essentially, the real story here is that if you ask eight people who were totally wrong about the Euro ten years ago whether they are still wrong, you will find out that six will say "yes", while one  will say he's changed his mind and one is undecided. The headline may as well be "Six hardcore europhiles still europhile".

There is no news hook for this report - someone at the BBC just decided to go out of their way to give this tiny group of people, who are utterly unrepresentative of business and the public, a platform, and then massively over-egg the importance of both them and their entirely predictable views.

As well as the biased premise for the research, the write up of the story itself is biased, not just misrepresenting the people questioned reporting "high profile campaigns both for and against entry" whilst failing to mention that the public overwhelmingly supported the No Euro campaign.

Can you imagine the BBC giving online and Today Programme coverage to news that six business people who opposed the Euro ten years ago still hold the same opinion? No - they would say it isn't news, and they'd be right. So why was this article ever written?

In an age of soundbite TV, the BBC shouldn't be axeing Straight Talk

It must be one of the BBC's cheapest news shows. Filmed with just two cameras, in an all black studio - evoking the Charlie Rose show from the USA -  the BBC's Straight Talk is a thirty minute interrogation of a leading politician by Andrew Neil. At least it was. Unfortunately Straight Talk is to be axed.

We live in a media world where 'I'm sorry we've run out of time' and 'Please be very brief' are interviewers' most-used expressions. It is a great shame that an exception to this rushed interview format - where politicians have the opportunity to give more than soundbite answers - and where the interviewer has the opportunity to properly explore one or two issues - will be scrapped. This sort of extended interview format is exactly what a public service broadcaster should be providing.

My favourite edition will always be Andrew Neil's interrogation of Vince Cable. Because of the lengthy format, Neil had the opportunity to expose the Liberal Democrat as a serial flip-flopper. Guido likened it to slowly boiling a frog. Soundbite politicians can soon sleep a little more safely in their beds.

Some schools deserve special treatment on BSF cuts

Many parents and voters will have been upset by the announcement last week that the national Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to an end.

But Michael Gove was right to make what must have been a very hard decision to end a wasteful programme. The subsequent problems with the list of what is going and what is being kept hardly made things any better, but the problems there are more likely to be the work of civil servants than the Minister.

Cutting BSF is part of the price that must now be paid to cover Labour's debts. Labour left us with the largest deficit in our peacetime history, and £1 in every £4 they were spending was borrowed. Investment in schools must continue and the proposals for "Free Schools" look promising what ever savings need to be found in the short term.

However, we should only look to cut where there are real savings to be made and recognise that some schools need the investment they have been banking on.

One example is South Camden Community School (SCCS), where I am a governor. There are many other schools like it across Britain: an inner city comprehensive with an ethnically diverse pupil mix.

SCCS is an example of one school that should be spared the cuts in BSF and so should a few other schools in a similar position where huge amounts of time and money have already been spent getting them close to breaking ground. The sunk costs are massive and it is widely recognised that new facilities will be needed.

In 2007 Ofsted noted the impact at SCCS of “the severe physical constraints of the site” and this will have to be addressed sometime, whatever the funding scheme is called. It should be now, when the half the work has already been done, rather than making cuts that will only lead to even more money having to be spent in future.

SCCS was one of the first schools to enter the BSF programme and while the national BSF programme has been a disaster of bad planning, bureaucracy and waste, SCCS has invested heavily with time and money in overcoming those problems. This investment cannot be clawed back if the programme is cancelled. Having invested so much already it would be foolish not to complete the process.

The work at SCCS is very close - only six weeks away from starting on site. Cutting the programme now would leave the school with an uncertain future as the new academic year starts in the autumn. Redeveloping SCCS will be much cheaper than building an entirely new school - about half the cost of some recent developments - but will still deliver the facilities and space that local children need. There are two new forms of entry due as part of the development in response to the growing number of children in the area.

There are other schools that are in a comparable situation where a similar case can be made, but not so many that it will derail national spending plans.

It was a brave decision to axe Building Schools for the Future. It will be a brave one to save those schools that, like South Camden Community School, deserve it.

Michael Gove, are you up to the task?

Peerless

A bizarre story in The Independent suggests that the Government may be considering going beyond removing from non-doms the right to sit in the Lords. Some petty Lib Dems are lobbying for snatching the title and the coat of arms as well.

Almost certainly this is a storm in a teacup, openly percolating so it can be gently replaced with a milder brew. But since we have seen some reckless strategies emerge over the past few weeks, it probably deserves a brief comment just in case – not least as a Downing Street source is reportedly involved.

I believe such brutalism goes beyond a simple attack on the hereditary system, a soft target which has now become almost de rigueur to vandalise. I think it is also another blow to our historical ties with the Commonwealth.

It is true that there has been a steady and huge decrease in the number and style of British honours awarded to non-Brits. Measures to end the awarding of peerages were pushed in Ottawa as early as 1919; the Order of Canada has been around for 40 years; Australia’s for 30; and even Victoria Crosses now come in distinct national forms. The shift was not helped by past British governments. In 2003, we saw the crass absurdity of a British Prime Minister awarding MBEs to an entire British rugby team, an honour not subsequently offered to their Commonwealth opponents.

So the weakening of those particular ties may have been going on for the last 90 years. It is after all an understandable feature of a country seeking to assert its own independence from imperial dominion, underlining its own sense of identity and loyalties. But it is not, however, in our national interest today to actively encourage the few remaining formal links to ebb away completely – which is of course why we still have a number of OCTs regularly represented on the Queen’s List.

The real reason for the proposed change is twofold – Lords Black and Ashcroft. The measure, bluntly, is personal. But if it’s personal, then why not add to the scales the examples of Lord Beaverbrook, Baron Strathcona, or Lord Thomson of Fleet? I’m sure readers can think of others.

Let’s not confuse the issue of tax exiles with that of honouring our fellow subjects overseas. Surely if our ties with a country are good enough, say, for a foreign national to serve without problems in the British armed forces, his compatriot should be considered loyal enough to be co-opted for his advice in the House of Lords? I can think of fewer proofs of Britain’s continuing goodwill and close feelings towards our closest Commonwealth friends that we should be able to offer a tiny handful of places in the Upper House to those whose opinions and input we could most surely value – including, I suggest, a representative of Gibraltar.

Daniel Kawczynski MP: A full public enquiry should be held into the release of the Lockerbie bomber by the Scottish Executive

An open letter to the Prime Minister from Daniel Kawczynski MP, chairman of the  All-Party Parliamentary Libya Group.

Dear Prime Minister,

In the run-up to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, I attempted to interact with the Scottish First Minister and Justice Secretary, asking them to reconsider their intention to release Mr Al-Megrahi.

As you know, they refused to heed the concerns of many people throughout the UK and abroad and release was sold to us on compassionate grounds stating the prisoner had only three months to live.  Now, of course, we hear the medical advice was inaccurate and Mr Al-Megrahi, ten months on, continues to live in Tripoli and there are predictions he may live for more then ten years.

Today I have learnt of calls by senior American Senators for an enquiry and investigation into this release, given the fact the Scottish Justice Secretary made such a dreadful mistake.  The Scottish Executive has made a decision of a profoundly misguided nature which has had an impact on the standing of the United Kingdom in the eyes of the Arab world and beyond.

I therefore ask you as Prime Minister to assess how your government can hold the Scottish Executive to account and urge you to work towards holding a full public enquiry into the release.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,

Daniel Kawczynski MP

Answers, please

From past experience, I had thought that the voting records of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MEPs would provide an early fracture point for the alliance. But judging by a recent vote on the External Action Service that doesn’t seem to be quite so self-evidently the case.

The Brok Report in its consolidated form includes a new explicit provision that staff should “carry out their duties and conduct themselves solely with the interests of the Union in mind”; this applies equally to seconded staff from the FCO. It underlines the need for personnel to enjoy diplomatic immunity. A strategic policy planning department is created. An executive chief office is established. There is confirmed linkage with military structures. In short, it takes the project a step further. The developments are not minor, as a glance at the large list of offices transferred to the EEAS organogram makes plain.

Some might argue that having voted for the EEAS (or in our case, most emphatically not), this is merely turning the Lisbon Treaty into practical reality. But we have long argued that the development of an EU diplomatic corps is a historical ambition that threatens British sovereignty and comes at significant cost. The Brok Report last week provided an opportunity for Conservative MEPs to formally register their disapproval. At the ‘catch-all’ vote stage, only three did – Messrs Deva, Hannan and Helmer, with Kamall and Van Orden putting on record an official abstention. Meanwhile, one of their colleagues was declaring on behalf of the rest that “the British Conservatives are reconciled and ready to engage with the service.”

I am not convinced that all this site’s readers will be so easily reconciled. We know some MEPs are avid readers. We also live in an accountable democracy. So let’s please have a proper explanation of how it is most of them came to support this measure. Repeatedly shrugging shoulders in the face of defeat in Brussels is precisely why the number of people advocating withdrawal from the EU is constantly growing.

The value of democracy

Though I am not a Democrat - a believer that policy is legitimate only insofar as the People rule themselves - I am a democrat - a believer that there ought to be elections for our rulers.  But if the purpose of elections is not to provide legitimacy for policy, what are they there for?