Stuffing the House of Lords - How David Cameron's maths just doesn't add up

In the wake of the scandal involving the House of Lords peer John Buttifant Sewel (where he was filmed taking what appeared to be cocaine and cavorting with prostitutes) the unelected and anti-democratic nature of the House of Lords has come back under scrutiny.

The SNP famously oppose the House of Lords and do not accept unelected peerages, so their condemnation of the system carries much more weight than the others, however the Liberal Democrats, Green Party and all four of the Labour leadership candidates have all stated that it's time for the long overdue reform of the House of Lords to make it more democratic, more accountable and less bloated and expensive.

David Cameron has taken a completely different stance, declaring his intention to do nothing whatever to reform the House of Lords, and instead continue to stuff it full of even more unelected peers (many of them major Tory party donors no doubt), using the absurd excuse that he needs to add even more unelected peers to the already bloated chamber to rebalance the composition of the House of Lords to match the composition of the House of Commons.

Before I get to demonstrating the absurdity of David Cameron's claim to be rebalancing the House of Lords in the name of fairness, it's important to point out how his plans to add even more unelected politicians to the Lords while planning to cut the number of elected members of the Commons is an affront to the concept of democracy. Cameron claims that the House of Commons needs to cut back 50 elected MPs in order to save money, yet in his time as Prime Minister he's already added an a staggering 197 unelected peers to the House of Lords, and intends to add at least another 50 more as soon as he gets the chance, and even more after that.

How David Cameron's maths just doesn't add up

David Cameron has consistently claimed that he needs to continue stuffing the bloated House of Lords with ever more unelected peers in order to rebalance the composition of the chamber to match that of the House of Commons, hence his decision to add dozens of Liberal Democrat peers alongside the scores of new Tory peers during the last parliament.

Under the current anti-democratic shambles of a system it's obviously not possible to remove Lib-Dem peers because their minor party is now massively over-represented, because it's not even possible to remove convicted perjurers like Jeffrey Archer, the jailed expenses cheats Paul White and John Taylor, nor even the convicted arsonist Mike Watson. 

Given that the House of Lords won't even remove convicted criminals, including two who were jailed for stealing from the taxpayer via their House of Lords expenses, it's not likely they're going to remove Lib-Dem peers for massively over-representing their dwindling party. So the only way for the House of Lords to be rebalanced is to increase the number of unelected peers from other parties until they are proportionate to the Liberal Democrat share of the House of Lords. There are two ways of doing this, it can either be done by balancing the number of peers per party to the share of votes cast at the last election, or by balancing the number of peers per party to the share of MPs in the House of Commons.
  
Balancing to the vote share

The Liberal Democrats took 7.9% of the vote at the 2015 General Election, which means that in order to be proportionate every 7.9% of the General Election vote a party got should return 101 unelected peers, or more simply, each 1% of the vote should be worth 12.78 unelected peers.

If we try to put this method of introducing proportionality into practice, the House of Lords would have to almost double in size to almost 1,500 unelected members (including the 179 unelected crossbench peers and the 26 unelected Church of England bishops).

Given that UKIP took 12.7% of the vote compared to the Lib-Dems 7.9%, they would need to increase their House of Lords contingent from the current 3 unelected peers to 160.

The Green Party would be entitled to another 47 unelected peers to add to their single member, the SNP would have to be offered 59 unelected peerages (which they would decline on principle) and various other smaller parties such as Plaid Cymru and the DUP would be entitled to several more unelected peers too.

In order to make the Tory and Labour share of the unelected peerages match the General Election vote share without removing any of the 101 Liberal Democrats, they would need an additional 241 and 172 seats respectively.

Under a system where the number of peerages is matched to the vote share in the General Election, it would be necessary for David Cameron to create almost 700 new completely unelected life peers.

Balancing to the number of MPs

If creating an additional 700 unelected peers in order to rebalance the House of Lords sounds crackers, then just think about how many new unelected peers would be needed to balance the House of Lords to match the share of MPs in the House of Commons.

The Lib Dems have 101 peers, but just 8 of the 650 MPs (1.2%). This means that for each 1% of the number of MPs a party has, they should be entitled to 84 unelected peers.

Due to the bizarrely unrepresentative nature of the House of Commons electoral system UKIP and the Green Party wouldn't fare too well, with an entitlement of just 12 unelected peers each to reflect the fact that they only got one MP apiece, despite bagging well over five million votes between them.

The big winners would be the SNP who would have the opportunity to decline the offer of 717 unelected peers to match their share of the MPs in parliament; the DUP, which bagged as many seats as the Liberal Democrats would be entitled to increase their number of unelected peers from 4 to 101; and Paid Cymru would be entitled to increase their representation of unelected peers from 2 to 38.

Labour and the Tories would once again be the biggest winners. Labour would need to increase their representation from 212 to 2,975 unelected peers, and the Tories would need to increase theirs from 226 to 4,225.

Using the number of MPs in the House of Commons as the base to which the House of Lords is rebalanced would require an upper chamber with 8,411 members (including the 205 bishops and crossbenchers)

So what is David Cameron's idea of fairness?

David Cameron clearly has no intention of properly balancing the House of Lords to reflect the vote share, nor the number of MPs, otherwise the House of Lords would have to become by far the most bloated legislative assembly in the entire world (it's already the biggest in the world outside of China).

What David Cameron means by fairness is stuffing the House of Lords with dozens more Tory supporters so that his government is able to force through deeply unpopular legislation (such as scrapping of the "free at the point of need" principle from the NHS) without resistance from the Lords, and screw the fact that the Liberal Democrats are massively overrepresented compared to all of the other minor parties.

David Cameron doesn't give a stuff about fairness, he's only using the concept of fairness as a convenient excuse for stuffing even more of his cronies and party donors into the unelected upper chamber. If he gave the slightest damn about fairness, then he'd not have completely ruled out reforming the House of Lords to make it a democratic and accountable institution, rather than the anti-democratic bastion of unelected and unaccountable establishment privilege that render claims that the UK is a democracy utterly laughable.

A much simpler proposal

The supposed "logic" behind David Cameron's efforts to rebalance the House of Lords is that the make up of the Lords should reflect the wishes of the electorate. However, rather than constantly adding ever more unelected Lords in order to rebalance the make up, it would surely be much simpler to introduce democratic elections so the public can directly influence the process, rather than have David Cameron load the place full of unelected establishment cronies.

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Why you should vote

In the weeks before the 2014 European and Local elections I did a lot of coverage in order to explain why it is a good idea to vote alternative, and to examine the policies of certain political parties in greater detail than the mainstream media care to.

One of the most commonly recurring comments has been the "why bother, they're all the same" expositions of apathy. Some people even made outright appeals to voter apathy with "Everyone should just stop voting" type comments (possibly inspired by Russell Brand).

In this article I'll explain why voting is important (without any platitudinous "you owe it to your ancestors" moralistic appeals) and explain why apathy is such a poor way of expressing discontent with the political system.

OK, I admit it, the voting system is rubbish

I believe that marking a piece of paper every five years or so for some rosette wearing politician to supposedly represent your interests from then until the next paper marking ceremony is an appallingly unrepresentative system, and that proper democracy should involve a great deal more citizen participation. If politicians had to actually consult the electorate (via local or national referendums) on the major decisions they take, there's no way they could get away with doing so many things that the majority of the public strongly oppose.

The voting system used in Westminster elections is particularly outdated and unrepresentative, and the vast number of "safe seats" (created by the lack of proportionality) has led to ever increasing levels of tactical voting (voting for a party you don't even like in order to keep out an even worse party) and outright political apathy.

However, realising that the current political system is flawed, unrepresentative and apathy inducing is no excuse for not voting. The system may be rubbish, but it's the only system we've got right now, so the key is to vote intelligently in order to change it from within.

Your options

When it comes to voting, you've got three options.

You can vote for the political establishment and support parties that have a vested interest in keeping the system pretty much exactly the way it is, because it keeps returning them to political power. The three parties that have governed the UK for the last 35 years have used this power to relentlessly push the Thatcherite ideology of neoliberalism, and they've sold off the national silver at bargain basement prices, despite the fact that the majority of the public would rather their essential infrastructure and services were publicly owned and run on a not-for-profit basis.

Voting for the establishment parties is essentially saying "more of the same please" to the political classes.

Voting alternative is seen as risky, especially in Westminster elections, because you might end up "splitting the vote" and letting one of the establishment parties that you strongly dislike get into power. This "splitting the vote" excuse doesn't wash in the European elections because they are conducted on a more modern proportional representation system, meaning that every vote counts, and minor parties are in with a good shout of actually getting MEPs elected. If you want to see real change then it is best to vote for a minor party that a. has a realistic chance of getting enough of the vote to return some MEPs and b. has a manifesto commitment to enact reform the voting system. 

Voting for an alternative party is essentially saying "I'm sick of this, I want change" to the political classes.

Not voting at all simply means that you're handing more political power to those that do choose to vote. Some people seem to think that by not voting at all they are expressing dissent, but it's simply not the case. Look at the 2012 PCC election farce. The turnout for this ludicrous election was the lowest in British electoral history, with 85% of the public not bothering to vote. In 8 of the regions the winning candidate ended up with votes from less than 5% of the eligible public! Do you think that any of them cared that 95%+ didn't bother to vote for them and then refused to take up their lucrative taxpayer funded jobs out of principle? Of course they didn't. Even if we upped the level of apathy so that everyone stayed at home, these people would still just vote for themselves, and still take up their jobs, without giving the slightest damn about their lack of mandate.

Not voting at all is essentially saying "I don't even care, I'll let other people decide for me" to the political classes.

Voting alternativeIn my view the only sensible option for people who are dissatisfied with the system is to try to change the system from within.

Put it this way, in 2010 David Cameron's Tory party received 23.5% of the eligible vote, yet 35% of people didn't even vote at all! The votes of less than a quarter of the public resulted in a shiny faced proven liar with no real world experience and appalling leadership skills becoming our Prime Minister, yet more than a third of people stayed at home!

If staying at home and not voting actually changed anything, then that 35% would have been the winner and the Prime Minister would have been decided in the most apathetic manner possible - perhaps the Queen picks a random National Insurance number out of a gigantic velvet bag and appoints that person Prime Minister (probably a better system than the one we've got). But that's not the way the system works, so instead we get a Prime Minister that 76.5% of the public didn't even want.

There are an awful lot of political tribalists who relentlessly vote for the same political parties. Put a red rosette on a donkey and there are former industrial heartlands that will vote it into power with a stonking great majority, and even if David Cameron killed, dismembered and ate a baby live on television, there are millions of habitual Tory voters who would still continue voting Tory. It's impossible to say exactly how many political tribalists there are, but I'd estimate around 15% each for the Tory party and Labour.

If a significant proportion of people who didn't bother to vote last time around decided to vote alternative, and people stopped voting tactically and voted for a party that they actually endorse, the establishment parties would probably still win the majority of seats because of the way they have rigged the system in their favour for the last hundred years, but alternative parties would gain a lot of seats and send a powerful shockwave through the establishment.

Why you should vote alternative in the European election

As I mentioned before, the European elections are conducted on a more modern proportional voting system, meaning there are no "safe seats", no "wasted votes" and no sane reason for voting tactically. If enough people in a region vote for a party, that party will end up with an MEP.

Another very good reason to vote in the European election is the appallingly low turnouts which have never exceeded 50%. In 2009 the turnout was just 34%. The fact that around two thirds of people won't bother to vote in this election has the effect of doubling the voting power of those who do. Not only do you get to vote for the party you actually like, your voting power is doubled too.

It is worth noting that the people of Wales and Scotland have their own national assemblies, which are elected on a proportional basis, but the people of England don't. If you live in England, the European elections are your only chance to vote under a fair electoral system.

Conclusion

The outdated and unrepresentative voting system used in Westminster elections is hopelessly unfair. The vast majority of people end up being represented by a politician they didn't even vote for. There isn't a single constituency in the whole of the UK where more than 50% of the electorate actually voted for the MP that supposedly represents their interests. Under such an unrepresentative system it is understandable that many people vote tactically (for parties they don't even like), and millions just give up hope and don't even bother to even vote at all.

The Westminster system badly needs to be reformed. My suggestions would be:

• Larger constituences with proportionality - This would get rid of all the safe seats, wasted votes and tactical voting rubbish, and it would provide people with a selection of local MPs, so that they can contact them all and judge which ones actually listen to their views and represent their interests, and then vote accordingly the next time around.

• Positive and negative voting - This would allow people to vote for the parties they actually like, and against the parties they hate.

• None of the above - A "none of the above" option would allow people to actively express their discontent with all of the candidates, rather than simply staying at home and not voting, which is easily mistakable for pure apathy.

• Local and national referendums - This would give people the chance to vote on the issues that concern them, rather than having that power outsourced to the local MP that in all probability, they didn't even vote for.

The European elections are different, and as far as I'm concerned, you've got no excuse for not getting out to vote for the party that best represents your political views (unless they are a really tiny fringe element without a chance of even picking up a few thousand votes). If you live in England and you don't bother to vote in the European elections, you're wasting the best opportunity you've got to vote for a party that you actually approve of.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.
  

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More Tory hypocrisy: Stuffing the Lords

On August 1st 2013 the Tory led government announced the addition of yet another batch of unelected political stooges to the anti-democratic House of Lords. Of the 30 new life peers, 14 are Tories, 10 are Liberal Democrats, 5 are Labour and one Green.

The fact that the Prime Minister of the day can simply select as many life peers as he likes to sit in the unelected House of Lords is one of the most anti-democratic examples of political patronage in world politics. To put the absurdity of our anti-democratic upper house into perspective, try to imagine for a moment the public outrage in the US or France if it was suggested that their fully elected senates were replaced with a system of unelected cronyism like ours.

Since David Cameron came to power three years ago, he has added an incredible 160 new life peers, which come at an average £130,000 a year cost to the taxpayer. This is a rate of 53 new peers a year, meaning that Cameron is adding unelected cronies to the House of Lords faster than any Prime minister in history. Tony Blair is the only Prime Minister to have averaged even half the rate of Cameron (34 peers a year). The rest of the people to have served as Prime Minister since Life Peerages were introduced, have added new peers at a rate of less than 25 a year. David Cameron's predecessor Gordon Brown only added only 34 peers in his three years, a fifth of the rate at which Cameron is currently stuffing the House of Lords.

Thanks to David Cameron's policy of stuffing the House of Lords, it has swelled to an incredible 861 members, none of them directly elected by the public and all of them entitled to £300 a day, plus expenses, plus subsidised food and drink in the various expensive eateries in parliament.

It is rumoured that Cameron has given the green light to yet another 23 Life Peers, but they are being made to wait a while before getting their free pass into the House of Lords because the government were afraid that adding more than 50 unelected peers in one go simply wouldn't wash with the public.

One of the most glaring problems with Cameron's abuse of the Life Peerage system is that several of the people he has given peerages to also happen to be enormous donors to the Conservative party. The pick of the current crop of 30 new lords is Anthony Bamford (of JCB fame) who had donated well over £2 million to the Tory party since 2001 via personal donations and donations through the JCB company accounts. Several other massive donors to the Tory party to have been given direct access to our pseudo-democratic parliamentary system include Philip Harris (£485,000 in Tory donations), Stanley Fink (£2.6 million in Tory donations), John Nash (£300,000 in Tory donations), Dolar Popat (£250,000 in Tory donations), George Magan (£800,000 in Tory donations) and Robert Edmiston (£1.1 million in Tory donations via his company). [source]

The fact that Cameron is rapidly stuffing the House of Lords with scores of Tory and Lib-Dem peers (including a concerning number of major Tory party donors) as a matter of official government policy is hardly surprising. It is clearly in the interests of the government to ensure that the unelected upper house is sympathetic to the government, so that any legislation the House of Commons passes, will simply be rubber stamped by the upper house. Stuffing the House of Lords with sympathetic cronies is exactly the kind of strategy one would expect of a self serving government with an aversion to oversight and accountability.

The problem for the Tories when it comes to their policy of stuffing the House of Lords with unelected political cronies, is that it runs entirely contrary to another Tory party policy, the electoral boundary reforms that were shot down in 2012 by the only noteworthy Liberal Democrat rebellion to date. The boundary reform plan was to reduce the size of the elected House of Commons from 650 members to 600, in a way that would ensure that the vast majority of seats to be lost would be in Labour and Liberal-Democrat constituencies.

Can anyone remember the Tory rhetoric on this? That a parliament of 650 is too big and unwieldy? Can anyone remember the official Tory party statement when the boundary reform legislation was defeated by the opposition parties and various Liberal Democrat and Tory party rebels? Well if you don't remember, here's the official statement released by David Cameron's press office:
 

"The Prime Minister's view is that he is strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper and fairer politics"

Now think about the way Cameron has been stuffing the House of Lords with scores of totally unelected Tory members (including several extremely wealthy Tory party donors) at an average cost to the taxpayer of £130,000 a year each. Think about the way Cameron has swelled the size of the unelected House of Lords from 704 members in 2010 to 861 now, with yet another 23 waiting in the wings.

Do these sound like the actions of a man that is "strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper, fairer politics"?

Do they buggery!

Once again Cameron's actions expose the emptiness of his words as just another populist justification narrative to obscure his real motivations (cementing Tory power by eliminating the parliamentary seats of opposition MPs). It is absolutely staggering that a man of such brazen dishonesty is able to serve as Prime Minister, he lies repeatedly and virtually everything he says is coated in a veneer of misleading political spin.

That Cameron is stuffing the Lords at an unprecedented rate is an incontestable demonstration that he was outright lying about his justification for boundary reforms. He clearly hasn't got the faintest interest in making politics smaller, cheaper and fairer. So what is the real motivation behind the Tory political reform agenda?

Lets think about how it is even possible to describe an elected house of 650 members as bloated and inefficient and demand that it is reduced by 50 members, whilst simultaneously believing that an entirely unelected house of 704 is nowhere near large enough and stuffing it with an additional 160 members in the space of just three years.

In my view, the only possible conclusion to draw from this contrast is that in the minds of people like David Cameron, the problem with the UK electoral system isn't that it is archaic, unrepresentative and riddled with anti-democratic practices, but that there is actually too much democracy and nowhere near enough unelected political privilege for their liking.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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The austerity death cycle

The Eurozone experiment in austerity is failing, as many people predicted that it would. The conventional tried and tested approach at times of economic downturn has been for the state to invest in productive activities, stuff like large infrastructure projects, housebuilding and public education. This type of investment creates jobs and improves the long term economic prospects with more efficient infrastructure, better quality and more affordable housing and a more highly educated workforce. Another common component in successful economic recovery strategies has been to put more disposable income into people's pockets, by providing welfare payments (pensions, child benefits, unemployment benefits) and reducing the cost of services like public transport of health care. Creating employment and reducing the cost of living increases the amount of disposable income in the system, which in turn increases economic demand.

The neoliberal austerity experiment is to try the opposite, to dramatically reduce government expenditure on stuff like infrastructure, housebuilding and education and to slash welfare payments by undermining existing pension agreements, eliminating many benefits and making the others much more difficult to obtain. Adherence to hard line austerity measures have intensified the Greek economic meltdown, created a vast unemployment problem in Spain and driven the UK back into recession.

The problem with "austerity" is that it is exactly the same kind of discredited neoliberal dogma that created the global financial meltdown in the first place. When the establishment response to the financial sector meltdown was to prop up the debt riddled institutions with direct government funding and Central Bank ultra-low interest "giveaway" loans, it was clear that maintaining the status quo was going to be the priority. They just needed a change of narrative in order to explain away the crisis. Thus the Great Neoliberal Lie was born. Excessive state spending, not reckless financial sector gambling had caused the crisis and the "only solution" would have to be "austerity".

The reason austerity is not working is that the austerity policies are not even meant to be a solution to the crisis, they are simply a justification for the continuation of the "orthodox neoliberal" agenda. The political and financial establishment are simply continuing to do what they want to do; to lower taxes on themselves and their supporters, reduce regulations limiting themselves and their supporters, funnel ever increasing amounts of state expenditure to themselves and their supporters whilst cutting welfare entitlements and labour conditions to those who are not their supporters. Their real reason is selfishness, their actual policy is just self interest dressed up in pseudo-scientific terms in order to fool people into thinking that it is complicated, when it isn't.

Realisation that "austerity" is actually destabilising the economy and damaging the long term economic outlook wont change anything, because fixing the economy was never the actual reason for doing it in the first place. The only way that the excesses of the free-marketeers can be reduced, is when the people have had enough. It took the US nearly half a decade to begin rectifying the Wall Street Crash with the New Deal, it took the Second World War to shake Western Europe into developing the stable and highly productive social democratic mixed economy model and it took the Argentine people around four years to replace the "orthodox neoliberal" establishment with true patriots, people that put national prosperity ahead of adherence to the self-interested, self serving ideology of globalised neoliberalism.

It seems that after four years of punishing ideologically driven austerity the Greeks are on the verge of ousting the neoliberal austerity pushers. I wonder if the British people still have the backbone and solidarity to rid themselves of their sickeningly self serving, corruption riddled, austerity loving establishment?

See also

The Great Neoliberal Lie

Mixed Economy vs Neoliberalism

Eurozone Austerity, neoliberalism rebranded

Austerity and the double-dip

What are Nick Clegg's pledges worth?

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg reportedly urged David Cameron to "remember the coalition pledge to institute House of Lords reform". I can't believe the man has the gall to invoke the word "pledge" ever again after the way he ordered his party to brazenly betray the students for a few scraps of Tory power.

The man is clearly a half-wit if he doesn't realise that to millions of people the word "pledge" is now a neologism meaning "Liberal Democrat dishonesty".

Letter to Ed Miliband

A letter sent to Ed Miliband MP, leader of the UK Labour party.

Dear Ed,

I read an interesting piece in the Guardian by Angela Eagle MP entitled "end to the greed creed" and was pleasantly surprised that it seemed like a step in the right direction.

I would like to see a concerted strategy from the Labour party to reengage the traditional Labour voter base and the huge numbers of disillusioned and disenfranchised UK voters (34.9% of the electorate didn't even vote in the 2010 election, that is almost as many people as voted for the Tories and the Lib-Dems combined 38.5%). 

Angela's criticisms of "market fundamentalism" and the admission that New Labour failed to to "tame the rightwing dogmas already unleashed" look like positive steps in the right direction but there is a lot more to be done if Labour are to convince the electorate that you are actually prepared to offer a viable alternative to militant neoliberal dogma rather than just "empty" criticisms of the neoliberal status quo.

For three decades government policies have been based on the assumption thatneoliberalism is a sensible economic strategy rather than aharebrained ideological dogma, and despite the crisis of neoliberalism the Coalition are demonstrably stuck in the obsolete market fundamentalist mold. I have devised a number of political strategies and potential economic policies that would help to demonstrate that Labour has developed some strong alternatives to policies based on the defunct ideology of neoliberalism.

Labour needs to present some benchmark policies that clearly demonstrate that the party both admits failure to confront the iniquities of neoliberalism in the past and a determination to restore principles of fairness and social justice in the future.

One such policy would be to demand tax transparency from private sector government partners. By this I mean Labour should propose legislation to prevent any company without a transparent tax structure from getting any form of government funds (outsourcing contracts, PFI deals, subsidies, loans or bailouts). If these companies siphon off corporate profits through tax haven based shell companies or use similar tricks to enable their employees to avoid/evade tax, they should have absolutely no right to enrich themselves on taxpayers' money.

Put simply and clearly "Transparent Tax in return for access to public funds", "Transparent Tax Accreditation for all government contractors" or "a serious strategy to confront the corporate tax ripoff".

The word "transparent" is vital for a positive public perception, it should be contrasted with the Tories secretive and evasive Swiss Tax deal, that allows tax cheats to both keep their anonymity and in many cases a hefty proportion of their ill gotten gains.

This "Transparent Tax" policy could be used to counter the fallout from therecently exposed PFI scandal and an opportunity to present the Labour party as a renewed force and the only mainstream party prepared to openly criticise bankrupt neoliberal economic dogma and offer new alternatives to restore "fairness". 

This reform of government spending policy should be presented in a context of an admission that Labour made mistakes in incentivising these kind of ripoff neoliberal "economic alchemy" PFI schemes. That these kinds of policies stemmed from the "unacceptable drift tothe right" in British politics, driven by the now discredited economic orthodoxy of "market fundamentalism" and the rightwing bias of the UK mainstream media. Labour must admit their mistakes and present the policy of Transparent Tax Accreditation as a demonstration that they are absolutely determined not allow the same mistakes to happen again. 

Although a Labour "apology" looks like a poor strategy, I feel that it would work very well in bringing a lot of your disillusioned natural left wing voter base back onside and in engaging the angry electorate that would welcome some signs of contrition from some of the politicians they feel have let them down (expenses & lack of political reform. Bailouts, lack of banking reform & austerity for ordinary working people). Most importantly apologising for New Labour's "driftto the right" is also an implicit criticism of the coalition government for their continuation of the kind of neoliberal economic dogma (self-defeating austerity, mass privatisations, lack of banking reform, marketisation of health care & education, cutting investment in education, research & infrastructure) that created the Neoliberal Economic Crisis in the first place. 

Other potential strategies include:

• Look back to the post-war consensus mixed economy (28 consecutive years of budget surpluses & a reduction of the national debt from 237% GDP in 1947 to just 43% in 1979 when the Neo-Tories tore it up), it wasn't called the "golden age of capitalism" for nothing. The1973 oil shock and late 70s strike actions that were used as excuses to tear down the post-war consensus now look like drops in the ocean compared to the Neoliberal Economic Crisis (including estimated PFI legacies & bailouts the national debt is back above 160% of GDP).
• Demand that any future bailouts or quantitative easing measures are used to stimulate long term economic growth by bypassing the financial sector to invest directly in education, science, research and development, public infrastructure projects and support to green & high-tech industries in order to help the UK catch up a bit with the high-tech economies after three decades of underinvestment. Contrast this investment strategy with the huge economically regressive spending cuts the coalition have inflicted on higher education and the sciences.
• Criticise the Coalition tuition fees hike as an "aspiration tax", since studies have estimated that even moderate interest rate rises would leave hundreds of thousands of low-mid income graduates (£21,000 - £42,000) trapped in negative equity on their student loans (unable to even cover the interest payments because of the interest+3% calculation), meaning a lifetime tax on what should be their discretionary income, simply for having aspired to educate themselves. Use socially beneficial professions such as nurses, engineers, scientists, teachers, town planners, forensic scientists, etc as examples of ordinary working people that will be hit hard by the negative equity "aspiration tax".
• Take a more pro-active role in the EU, push for an end to the democratic deficit, strengthen EU trading rules to prevent the economic punishment of countries that comply with EU regulations to prevent them from being undercut by countries that opt out (the decimation of UK pig farming after other EU nations opted out of costly animal welfare reforms is a classic example of this problem).
• Strongly criticise "Osborne's ideologically driven and self-defeating austerity" and make it clear that the Labour party advise him that "targeted taxation" (perhaps on speculative banking practices, short term executive bonuses and some form of Land Value Tax), curbs on capital flight (tax dodging) and infrastructure investment are tried and tested methodologies for restoring economic growth. (numerous citable examples: Roosevelt's new deal, the post-war consensus, Argentine recovery economics 2002-present). He will either continue with his "stagflationary" policies or he will have to eventually change course giving Labour the chance to question his reasons for delay.
• Renewal of housing policy (much more on this if you would be interested).
• Strategies to stabilise the highly volatile financial sector (ask if you are interested).
• Economic localisation and efficiency strategies (more details upon request).
• Innovative political reform (again ask if you would like to discuss my ideas in this area).

I hope you find these ideas interesting and care to discuss them with your colleagues in the Labour party. I have plenty more strategies and ideas and believe that I would be a valuable addition to the Labour party strategic planning team. I would be delighted if you would like to continue this correspondence, not that I expect it. I've written to many, many politicians with my ideas over the years and the abject lack of responses suggest that letters like this are put straight into the crank file (the bin).

I am keen to help the Labour party to devise some strong economic policies and coherent political strategies in order to help overcome the widely held public perception of a Labour crisis of identity (new labour, blue labour, old labour, purple book....).

Yours faithfully

Thomas G Clark

Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), Ed and his team didn't bother to respond to this letter.

 If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.

Nick Clegg and the great Lib-Dem betrayal.

Lib-Dem leader, Nick Clegg's pledges,
not worth the paper they are written on.

When the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum was defeated, most progressive thinkers in Britain saw it as a defeat that signalled an end to their dream of any kind of fair or proportional Parliamentary electoral system in their lifetimes, resigning themselves to the idea that political reform is dead, mainly thanks to the Liberal Democrats.

For those of you that don't know, the Liberal Democrats were a fairly popular political party that campaigned tirelessly on two key issues. The first being their opposition to fees for university education and the second being the need for wide ranging political reform to our anachronistic and undemocratic political system.

When there was no overall winner in the 2010 General Election the moment had come for the Liberal Democrats, they were the kingmakers. They had three main options,

1. Let the Conservatives form a minority government and win plaudits by shooting down every bit of unpopular and barkingly right wing "Nasty Party" legislation.
2. Formed a rainbow coalition government with Labour and some other "minor parties", that may not have had a majority, but could have formed a larger voting block than the Conservatives.
3. Formed a coalition with the extremely unpopular Conservatives.

Choosing the third option was a huge gamble, the Tories had been out of power for a political generation and the actions that had put them into the political wilderness (Union busting, industry destroying, Poll Tax raising, rail privatisating, scapegoat bashing, coddling of the rich) made them one of the most reviled parties in British political history.

In thirteen years of opposition the Tories had shown absolutely no signs of softening of their far-right neoliberal agenda other than some transparently misleading and inept "hug a hoodie" style rubbish to pretend that they had given up on the Thatcherite "no such thing as society", "greed-is-a-virtue" attitudes that had made them so unpopular.

Despite 13 long years of exactly the same kind of transparently neoliberal governance (that had made the Tories so unpopular) from the supposedly socialist Labour government, combined with their tendency to score repeated own goals (Iraq, National ID Database, Mandelson, Blunkett, Cash for honours implications, Fuel protests, Foot and Mouth) the Tories were still so unpopular that they were unable to deliver a majority of the MPs in the 2010 election.

The sight of Nick Clegg and David Cameron laughing it up
in the Downing Street garden was enough to make hundreds of thousands
of Lib-Dem voters vow to never vote for them again.

The British electoral system is so anachronistic and so unrepresentative that even though the Conservatives had only gained on 36% of the vote (23% of the registered electorate) the system handed them 47% of the MPs and put them within spitting distance of power. In 2005 the imbalance of the system was even more pronounced with Tony Blair's Neo-Labour party securing a strong majority (54.6% of MPs) with the votes of only 21% of the registered electorate.

The 2010 hung parliament was the Liberal Democrats' golden opportunity to undo this imbalance that had been created by decades of successive Tory and Labour governments rigging the system in their favour, but they squandered it terribly.

A coherent Liberal Democrat strategy would have been to draw some very clear red lines on political reform, tying them into the huge public anger at the expenses scandal. The lines should have been made on a few very clear subjects. My picks would have been:

1. A fully elected house of Lords.
2. Right of recall for corrupt or compromised MPs.
3. A modern proportional balloting system.

The Tories would certainly have rejected a democratic House of Lords and Proportional Representation, leaving the Liberal Democrats to take the moral high ground and either forge a rainbow coalition with Labour and others, or allow the Conservatives to form a minority government.

Many people have repeated the claim that the Tories would have called another snap election, then won it outright. However it is my opinion that this would have been a very dangerous strategy for a party that had just failed to secure a majority government then turned down a coalition out of entrenched opposition to progressive electoral reform.

The Liberal Democrats could have made enormous political capital out of the refusal. Appealing strongly to anyone with a progressive bone in their bodies by repeating the line that "we are the party of political reform, Labour wasted 13 years of majority government in which they could have brought in reform and now the Tories have shown that they are fundamentally opposed to reform of this anachronistic, undemocratic and corrupt system". No doubt the Labour party would also have gained extra political capital by painting the Tories as a bunch of regressive reactionaries too.

The idea that the Tories were somehow a shoe in for victory in a re-run of the 2010 election is absolute fantasy, and the fact that it is repeated so often by Liberal Democrat supporters to justify their role in the coalition shambles just illustrates how low their estimations of their own party have become.

Clegg was an idiot not to see that he was getting so much of his traction from the pre-election reform politics rhetoric, it's a shame it was just hollow political spin. If only he'd stuck by it they could either have made themselves even more popular by shooting down every bit of regressive right wing policy from the Tories or in the case of a snap-election they could have gone into the re-election campaign with even more people saying "I agree with Nick",winning an increased share of the vote and an even more powerful position to act as kingmaker in return for real political reform.

Instead all they managed to negotiate out of the Conservatives was a national referendum on an alternative voting system unimaginatively called Alternative Vote. The fact that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had previously described the Alternative Vote system as a "miserable little compromise" demonstrated their pitiful negotiation skills. Not only was Alternative Vote absolutely nothing like a properly proportional voting system (little more than an absurd multiple vote recounting system), the referendum was doomed to failure because rich establishment Tories launched an expensive NO2AV campaign with Nick Clegg as the poster boy. Their campaign consisted of little more than advising people to vote no to AV in order to give "sell-out Nick" a good kicking, backed up with a load of misinformation and outright lies. The fact that Tory supporters were bankrolling a demonisation campaign against Nick Clegg for the act of forming a coalition with their own party was incredibly brazen, but it worked and the the Liberal Democrats' "miserably compromised" dream of progressive political reform was comprehensively defeated.

One of the main reasons Clegg had become such a hate figure with the public was the incredible Liberal Democrat U-turn on tuition fees. The party had spent more than a decade building up their student vote with a principled opposition to the commodification of university education and student fees. Before the election, every single Liberal Democrat MP, including Clegg held signed large signed pledges, which read "I pledge to vote against any increase in student fees". Within months they ditched their pledges in order to vote through the highest university fees in the world for English (but not Scottish or Welsh) students. Meaning that millions of low-mid income (£21,000-43,000) English graduates will be lumbered with a lifelong negative equity "aspiration tax" that they will continue to pay for their entire working lives.

The defeat for Nick Clegg's hopelessly compromised electoral reform was not the end of political reform in the United Kingdom, the Tories had a number of extremely regressive and anti-democratic political reforms up their sleeves and absolutely no intention of bringing them to a public vote.

Instead of a fair and proportional voting system the Tories decided to launch a gerrymander scheme that looks to further entrench the two main parties (both adherents of orthodox militant neoliberal dogma) by reducing the number of Parliamentary seats to 600, even further diminishing the likelihood that alternative parties will be able to obtain fair representation. Not only that, but the Tories decided to disenfranchise up to 10 million voters by replacing mandatory electoral registration with a more complex voluntary scheme designed to permanently scare off young people and the politically disengaged, a plan to erase millions of people from political participation.

Just like with tuition fees, the Lib-Dems have feebly enabled the Tories to deliver exactly the opposite of what the vast majority of their voters actually voted Lib-Dem for. Their voters overwhelmingly opposed the further commodification of higher education and desperately wanted to see progressive electoral reform.

The Lib-Dems meekly handed them the opposite, the highest fees in the World to attend public universities, and some disgustingly regressive, anti-democratic reforms to the voting system, that would resemble a political Coup d'etat if it weren't being carried out by the incumbent government.

A large proportion of Liberal Democrat voters wanted them to do well in the election so that they could open the door to proper political reform. In the wake of the expenses scandal and bankers' bailouts the timing couldn't have been better. Instead of seizing the moment to rejuvenate British politics by battling tirelessly for fair representation and an end to conflicts-of-interest and corruption, they have actually helped the Tories nailing shut the door of reform forever.

The only problem for the Lib-Dems is that they are so clueless that they haven't even realised that they are on the other side of the door, nailing themselves outside the corridors of power with the other minor parties whilst "the Nasty Party" and the Neo-Labour party are on the inside laughing at their stupidity.

Recent events like the Neoliberal Economic Crash and the Expenses scandal handed Britain the greatest opportunity ever to reform her anachronistic political system, to stamp out corruption and undemocratic practices and take the levers of power back from the bunch of crazy "greed-is-good" morons that have been running the show for 30 years, however the ball fell to the Lib-Dems and instead of running with it they meekly handed it over to the Tories to bury in a million tons of concrete.

Not only have the Liberal Democrats ruined any real chance of progressive political reform for the foreseeable future, they have created the impression (through inductive logic) that any minor party campaigning on a platform of political reform in the future will probably just be clueless and immoral liars like the Lib-Dems, searching for the breadcrumbs of power.

If this had been a deliberate plan to completely destroy the Liberal Democrat party from the inside, further entrench militant neoliberalism as orthodox political dogma in the UK and kick the prospect of progressive political reform at least 50 years in the future, Clegg and the Lib-Dem leadership couldn't have executed it better.

See Also

Do you hate Nick Clegg?

The Great Neoliberal Lie

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

Austerity and the Double-Dip

House of Lords reform

The unelected pigs are squealing
at the prospect of democracy in the House of Lords.

The United Kingdom is not a proper democracy. This is indisputable for many reasons, the existence of a monarch with the power to dissolve parliament, an electoral system that renders the votes of millions of people utterly worthless and most importantly the undemocratic shambles that is the House of Lords.

The idea of a completely unelected upper house would be utterly incomprehensible to residents of many other countries. Admittedly democratic systems across the world suffer from their own specific defects but the idea of an unelected Senate would be shocking to most people in France, Germany, Italy or the United States.

The votes of around 40,000,000 Brits determine the 650 representatives in the House of Commons yet the 789 members of the House of Lords have been selected by just 9 men and 1 woman since the introduction of the Life Peerages act in 1958 (see table below). At first the Prime Minister selected life peers to top up an upper house stuffed with hereditary peers who had simply inherited their positions of power and authority from their fathers. Before the 1997 General Election Tony Blair promised House of Lords reform but only carried out half of it removing hundreds of Tory Hereditary peers in 1999 but failing to bring in a proper democratic replacement in favour of stuffing the place with 357 of his hand picked unelected political stooges.

Since 1999 the selection of unelected life peers has been an important part of a Prime Minister's job allowing him to alter the balance of power in the upper house to suit his own interests. This is best illustrated by the fact that David Cameron created 116 life peers in his first year in office,  nearly ten times the rate of Tory predecessor Alec Douglas-Home who created only 14 life peers in his one year stint as Prime Minister between 1963 and 1964.

Before the 2010 General Election all three major parties committed themselves to introducing some democracy to the upper house in their manifestos however the overwhelming majority of the unelected rabble that are famously allowed to claim expenses just by signing in and doing absolutely nothing else are obviously strongly opposed to any kind of democratic reform.

The current unelected peers will almost certainly vote down any proposals to apply democracy to the upper house and some have even claimed that use of the Parliament Act to impose reform would be "unconstitutional". They know as well as anyone that the United Kingdom has no written constitution and that the Parliament Act has been used before to prevent the undemocratic Lords from sinking legislation from the less undemocratic Commons.

It is quite pleasant to know that these horrible unelected political stooges are getting so upset at the prospect of losing their power, influence and expenses however this feeling is tainted by the knowledge that they will just be replaced by another tier of corrupt, dishonest, self serving career politicians wearing the rosettes of the three main political parties in the UK, Neo-Liberal Blue, Neo-Liberal Red & Neo-Liberal Yellow.

Peerage dignities created under the Life Peerages Act 1958

Prime Minister	Party	Tenure	Peers	Per year
Harold Macmillan	Conservative	1957–1963	48	9.6
Alec Douglas-Home	Conservative	1963–1964	14	14.0
Harold Wilson	Labour	1964–1970	123	20.5
Edward Heath	Conservative	1970–1974	56	14.0
Harold Wilson	Labour	1974–1976	80	40.0
James Callaghan	Labour	1976–1979	57	19.0
Margaret Thatcher	Conservative	1979–1990	200	18.2
John Major	Conservative	1990–1997	141	20.1
Tony Blair	Labour	1997–2007	357	35.7
Gordon Brown	Labour	2007–2010	34	11.3
David Cameron	Conservative	2010-	116	116
Total			1,226	23.2