Cameron's Losing Battle Against Tory Puritanism

With Tory cabinet ministers - led by the ubiquitous Mr. Gove - scrambling over each other to assure their party of their out and out Euro-scepticism, it is tempting to wonder what all the fuss over UKIP is about.  Apart from a matter of timing, it seems they are all united on a referendum approach.  But, of course, there is more to it than this.

UKIP is not just a repository for those who are anti-European.  Indeed, Europe is merely the hook on which to hang a whole panoply of other concerns, making UKIP essentially a protest party.  For disillusioned Conservatives in particular UKIP offers an unrepentant leader in Nigel Farage, who contrasts nicely with the rather more nuanced Mr. Cameron.  Tory members - both grassroots and a significant number of backbench MPs - are not happy in coalition, hate the thought of Tory moderation and dislike the grey shades that come with compromise.  In their black and white - or blue and red - world, there is much virtue in Tory puritanism and Mr. Cameron's great crime is that he fails to see that.

Mr. Cameron, of course, is trying to work in the real world.  His Toryism derives from his upbringing rather than any form of deep political conviction, and it was never honed through a party activism that might have brought some deeper, grittier understanding of the party he leads.  His Toryism is more instinctive, and thus more inclined to accommodate itself to the demands and pressures of the world outside the bubble of the Conservative Party.  That was what was behind his chaotic but worthy pursuit of 'modernism' and it still lies behind his desire not to take knee-jerk approaches to such complex issues as membership of the EU.  Mr. Cameron is, at heart, a Tory pragmatist of the type that used to dominate in the twentieth century heyday of the party.

The party he leads no longer resembles the triumphant machine of last century.  It is debateable as to how far this change is down to the legacy of the party's first truly ideological leader - Margaret Thatcher - and how much would have occurred in any case as a result of a growing sense of alienation in the modern world.  Whatever the cause, the Conservative Party today is a beast of puritanism, railing against the many iniquities of the world but not hugely capable of propounding broad-based solutions.  Like 16th century puritans, today's Tories take comfort in their purity and isolation and want nothing to do with the murky waters of compromise politics.  Even before the halfway mark of the Coalition, many Tory backbenchers had been restlessly pushing against the constraining walls of joint-party government.  They have managed to breach some of them now, even to the extent of proposing Bills that challenge their own government's legislative agenda.  But then, it is difficult at times to distinguish backbench Tories from a brand of opposition MP.

Europe - or rather, its forced removal - is the great prize.  Mr. Cameron has tried to feed that hungry appetite but has found its gaping maw remains open for more no matter how much he tries to satiate it.  He is facing the same problem as the last Tory premier, John Major.  Paul Goodman makes the comparison on Conservative Home, and puts the issue down to a failure of leadership on the part of both men.  But this is not the whole story.  It is not really possible for any outward-facing Tory leader to lead his party.  No-one who is not a died-in-the-wool euro denier has a hope of gaining the support of the Tory backbenchers, and yet when such men are put into leadership they fail to gain the country as a whole.

Europe, however, merely represents the high water mark of the Tory Party's desire to become an unadulterated and unrestrained party of the right.  They envy UKIP its easy positions and rather want them for itself.  There are many Tories now who would prefer purity to election.  Mr. Cameron is no longer simply struggling against the euro monster.  He is struggling against a much wider desire to retreat to a position of political comfort, a position which he tried to force the party to leave when he became leader.  It is possible that his failure was due in part to the incoherent nature of his modernisation project, which was too Blairite in nature and could have had more success if it had taken stronger account of the historic position of One Nation Toryism.  The big question is whether, if Mr. Cameron does in the end fail - and the signs are that he has - there is ever going to be another chance for the Tory Party to be a broad-based party of the centre-right, or whether it will simply take UKIP's mantle, and stay on the fringe.  When your likely successor is Michael Gove, it doesn't look like it.

The Problem With Michael Gove

It's a great pity Michael Gove can't just become history rather than being able to prounounce upon it.  If he were one of those tedious old bores who keeps telling you how much better things were in the old days then one could safely nod sagely and expect to escape within about half an hour or so.  Sadly, Mr. Gove can't be escaped from very easily, and his unformed views on history teaching matter because he is the Education Secretary, the man who can dictate what we teachers do if he so chooses.  And it appears he does so choose.

Michael Gove has no expertise or experience in teaching, and as an English graduate he sports no more historical acumen than the interested amateur.  The interested history amateur is, of course, not to be sniffed at.  The great virtue of history is that it can and should be read, savoured and enjoyed by all.  Mr. Gove, unfortunately, believes that he has a mission to restore a form of history recitation to schools that used to be quite popular in the Victorian era.

Gove has decided, bizarrely, that primary schools - with their non-specialist teachers and very young children - are the best places to learn the intricacies of medieval history, and that secondary schools should confine their teaching to a dry and colourless list of philanthropists, politicians and inventors accompanied by appropriate dates.  He and his team - two special advisers whose main interest is the social media site twitter - sat themselves down recently, compiled a list of dates, events and people that they remembered from parlour games of the past, and proposed it as the new history curriculum for schools.  Their dire proposals have been universally lambasted by the history teaching profession and by such eminent historians as Sir Richard Evans.  But Mr. Gove knows better of course.  Now he has taken his campaign further by criticising a lesson resource he appears to have found on the internet, which involves using the Mr. Men to teach history.  I have never come across this idea, and know of no history teacher who would consider using it, but that hasn't stopped Mr. Gove from displaying it as an example of all that is bad with history teaching in secondary schools.  He may preach a fine line about rigorous teaching and good research, but he could never knowingly be accused of actually using such qualities himself.  His ludicrously ill-informed campaign against history in schools has been a classic study of opinionated preconceptions driving policy. 

It is interesting, incidentally, that Mr. Gove's speech today spent some time attacking the methods used by primary schools to teach history, yet these are the very places that he now wants to place some of our most complex and crucial history teaching.  It is also notable that most of his anecdotes are unlikely to be very clearly sourced, and it could prove well nigh impossible to find schools who really do teach in the way he describes.

Mr. Gove may be fast becoming the single best reason not to vote Conservative at the next election, if only in a desperate bid to save decent, interesting school history from his destructive clutches.  But I suspect his real reason for sounding like such a reactionary oaf is more to do with his desire to court both the right of his party in anticipation of a post-election leadership campaign, and to place himself as the man who can deal with UKIP.  If that means wrecking a bit of history teaching in schools, then so be it, but it is a tragedy that Gove's desire for populist approval in his party could lead to such serious undermining of school history curriculums.

Othello, but not at the National

In the week of Shakespeare's birthday (probably) it is no bad thing to indulge in a bit of Shakespeare watching, and so I took myself off to see Othello with a couple of friends.  No, not the lauded one at the National, but a great fringe production in a north London pub.  Well, at the top of it anyway.  The review is here. 

Envy, jealousy and rage in a war camp setting are one thing, but there must be a chance soon to comment on our own prime minister's uneasy relationships.  Looking over his shoulder all the time at Boris Johnson, he has decided that one of his best manouevres is simply to get a member of Johnson's family on board, and so he has appointed Jo Johnson - unlike Boris, an MP - as his new head of the policy unit.  Whether that's to generate new political ideas, or just because the magic of the Johnson name is meant to assuage unhappy Tories who believe Cameron is too left-wing, is yet to be seen.  It's probably not a long term solution to electoral unpopularity though, which is likely to be given another display in the forthcoming county elections. 

Funeral Reflections on Margaret Thatcher

I was nursing a hot chocolate in a small café beneath one of the North Yorkshire peaks when someone told me that Margaret Thatcher had died.  There were no rumblings in the nearby mountains, no lighting strikes and the rain didn’t stop falling, but it was possible nonetheless to feel a sense of the profound.  We all of us, after all, live in a country whose political environment she has largely ordered, and the acres of print and online commentary which followed the announcement of her death was all produced by men and women whose own political outlook was shaped by her.  We are all Children of Thatcher.  Progressives and reactionaries, lovers and haters, nationalists and internationalists, we have all had our political consciousness defined by the woman whose funeral procession will move along the Strand and Fleet Street and up to St Paul’s this morning.  It is an extraordinary reflection of her impact.  Just as politics seemed to be retreating into blandness, and fewer people want to be bothered with political argument, it all comes flooding back.  Thanks to her.

My own earliest political memories and actions are to do with the Lady.  I canvassed for her, as a member of a relatively political family, in 1979; rejoiced in her triumph at a preternaturally early age on that sunny May day; went on to join the Young Conservatives where Thatcher would be greeted by enthusiastic ovations on the last day of the national conference, even while it was in the hands of some distinctly non-Thatcherite Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen.  And even when I started to move away from the Thatcherite creed, I never doubted – no one did – the impact of this woman who had taken Britain by the scruff of the neck in 1979 and sought to re-boot it.  Meeting her in person was a defining moment, even if she did spend some time attacking the profession – teaching – that I had recently joined.  But then that was – and is – the point about Margaret Thatcher.  She had no time for false niceties.  She was blunt in her opinions and her actions, in the black and white world she looked upon, and she expected others to be the same.

There is an irony in the Ding Dong brigade being so triumphalist.  You can sing Ding Dong Socialism’s dead.  Or Communism.  Or militant trade unionism.  And you’d be right in those instances.  Indeed, if you really must, you can remind everyone via a 1930s Munchkin song that the Lady herself is dead.  But her ideas aren’t.  Her legacy isn’t.  Enjoy the song while you can, you preening lefties, for Thatcherism has survived everything you sought to protect. 

But of course, she also managed to destroy One Nation Conservatism, the creed of this very blog.  She gave it lip service, commenting that “We must learn again to be one nation, otherwise we shall end up as no nation”, but that wasn’t really a commitment to what we understand as One Nation Conservatism.  She was as happy to spell the end of a brand of conservatism that she considered weak and inarticulate as she was the trade unionism which had halted much of Britain in the months before her march on power.  Yet even for us, the last remaining outpost of old Toryism, her death is an event to provoke respect and to stimulate reflection.

Why should we respect her?  Why should we draw ourselves to mark her passing on this funeral day?  Because she is of a rare breed.  She is of a breed that sees politics as a can-do vocation.  A breed that allows no obstacle to stand in the way of political passion.  A breed that comes to political maturity at just the time they are needed, to change things, whether through conflict or persuasion, because actually, the change is so very needed.  A breed that makes the political world seem so much larger and so much more important because the scale of their own thinking and activity is so monumental.  We mark her passing because we know very well that she will be one of only a handful of political leaders whose name will remain part of the common currency of discussion and memory a century or more hence.  That is what makes her passing worth marking.

When this day is done the passions won’t much die down, and her name and legacy will still inspire furious argument on either side.  But we will return to the sometimes dead-ended politics of today and may occasionally wonder what could happen if another person of the Lady’s ilk were to bestride the political nation again.  We might have some nostalgia for a time when ideas really seemed to matter, or we might be grateful for our less troublesome, more mediocre politicians.  But we will know that the era to which Margaret Thatcher gave her name was indeed an extraordinary one in the annals of British politics.  And we are still living in its shadow.

Michael Goveathonics

Michael Gove believes himself to be the greatest historian living.  Only he really understands how to impart the most important historical knowledge to youths in schools.  Nothing else really explains his fantastic new history curriculum, which breezily rejects the advice of top historians, and of all the rather less academically inclined practitioners of teaching history, and instead gives us the Gove History of Britain.  When he and his two advisers played the game "who do you think are the most important figures in making Britain great" and turned it into a would-be history syllabus, they were merely assuring each other that they really did know better than anyone else.

Well, it turns out that this is but a small part of what is going to be the only subject on the Great British School Curriculum - Michael Goevathonics.  It is outlined, ever so clearly and horrifyingly realistically, by comedian Stewart Lee in his Observer column today.  Lee reminds us that Gove was once a television satirist, thus setting up the awesome possibility that Gove has been playing a subtle political satire on us all ever since.  But read the column.  It is ridiculous, surreal and satirically brilliant.  It is no longer possible to simply criticise Gove in normal, layman's terms.  You have to reach out to the existential fringes of satire to really nail him, and Lee does that.

Along the way, the Old Silhillian also remarks upon his own unremarkable education.  And - significant name drop alert - I too remember that, for we shared the same secondary schooling for a couple of years.  Yes, before he became alternative comedy's most alternative mainstream comedian, Stewart Lee was penning such dramatic gems as "The Central European Safe-Cracker" and getting it performed on stage with scenery in various stages of collapse.   I think I even know which teachers he is talking about.  In an exclusive blogpost I might just reveal their identities one day, and subject their teaching to a line by line analysis.  Or I might not.  On the grounds of lack of interest.  Who wants to read about teachers anyway?

Eddie Mair Skewers Boris

Most interviewers succumb to Boris Johnson's peculiarly bumbling charm and thus fail to really nail him on political or personal issues.  It remains something of a mystery as to how this most flawed of politicians remains such a public favourite, but this morning one interviewer did at least manage to treat Johnson as a politician and not a celebrity, and quietly stuck the knife in with nearly every question.

Somewhat ill advisedly, one suspects, Boris has agreed to be interviewed for a documentary about himself, "The Irresistible Rise of Boris Johnson", to be shown on BBC2 tomorrow evening.  The Marr Show's presenter for the day, Eddie Mair, was thus on interviewing duties with Boris this morning.  Mair is already one of the BBC's most highly regarded interviewers by those who appreciate well informed and forensic interviews.  His on-screen honesty was a gem when he fronted 'Newsnight' at the time that programme was under the microscope for its Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine failings.  Now, he was ready with his unshowy, gleaming interrogator's knife, for the most obfuscating man in British politics.

Mair used the upcoming documentary to ask Johnson about his personal failings, bringing them one by one to a clearly discomfited mayor.  Did Johnson fake a quote when a journalist at the Times?  Did he lie about his adultery to party leader Michael Howard?  Did he really agree to collude with his friend Darius Guppy in the planned beating up of a fellow journalist?  Mair just kept putting these to Johnson, and failed to adopt the chummy persona that so many interviewers do when confronted with this man.  On twitter, the Mair strategy was a hit.  "Murder on television", "car-crash TV", "the best interviewer the BBC has" - plenty of positive coverage for Mair's businesslike approach.   Guido Fawkes, of the high-rated political website, even tweeted that the most worthy successor to Andrew Marr would only require a one letter change in the opening credits should he take over!

Boris Johnson's leadership ambitions - and Mair didn't get him to admit he wanted to be Prime Minister in his one interview fail - are still a long way off.  He is not even an MP, and he was never as successful in parliament as he is as a one man show now.  But the more he is talked up as a future leader, the more, eventually, his distinctly erratic career will be subject to the sort of questions Mair raised this morning, and the documentary tomorrow will presumably feature.  Michael Cockerell is behind the documentary, and he normally comes up with first class political television.  Should be as gripping as a Sorkin drama, and a lot less optimistic.

Culture Break - Cloud Atlas

I don't think I'm ever going to make it as an up to speed reviewer, but I did finally get to go and see the extraordinary film "Cloud Atlas" - review is here.  Very engaging film, visually brilliant of course (it's the Wachowskis after all) but possibly didn't quite meet its ambitions.

The Spectator's No

I'm certainly pretty clear that I think the press is too monstrously arrogant and out of control to avoid external regulation.  My previous two posts, and the links therein, bear this out.  The screeching noise from the media itself has added over the last couple of days to the impression of arrogance.  Nevertheless, the argument against regulation can still be made in a reasoned way, and the Spectator this week has attempted to do just that.  I'm not convinced the Spectator would be likely to fall foul of the new demands for press integrity contained in the proposed legislation, but despite its tastelessly tabloid-style cover this week, editor Fraser Nelson presents the case against the Charter, blogging his conclusions here, which seems to encompass his fear of a threat to the freedom of online expression too.  The main article is in the magazine's print edition.

More Press Noise

The press are certainly able to make a lot of noise.  Most of the country may not be that bothered about press regulation, but it has definitely become the NUMBER ONE ISSUE for the denizens of the media class.  The Budget is almost looking like light relief tomorrow.

There are a few voices of sanity if you look hard enough.  Amol Rajan in the Evening Standard yesterday commented on the dangers of victim justice, while Will Sturgeon on today's Media Blog provides a reminder of exactly why press regulation is on the agenda, and it's not to do with politicians trying to extend their power, funnily enough.

But there is also still plenty of group press hysterics to keep us all entertained, nowhere more obviously than in Quentin Letts' parliamentary 'sketch' in today's Mail.  Letts is so focused on pouring vitriol over the heads of any MP who dared suggest that press regulation is needed that he quite forgot to be funny.  Or maybe that's become his house style nowadays.  He even managed to take a pop at Max Mosley for simply sitting in to watch the debate.  His best line, when he wasn't giving a bit of soft-focus loving to the few anti-motion Tories, was when he suggested journalism wasn't elitist because "its very rawness links it to the street".  What sort of street does Mr. Letts think his celeb reporting, Westminster inhabiting colleagues are living on?  It's been a while since the Mail produced any serious investigative reporting which makes it all the more remarkable that they've suddenly discovered the need for a liberty-defending investigative press.  Sadly no amount of press regulation will deprive us of this sort of self-serving nonsense, delivered in the name of campaigning journalism.

Freedom of the Press? Or Abuse of Power?

A powerful and over-mighty institution that has abused its power, lied publically over the years, ruined the lives of innocent people and vigorously defends its right to attack all manner of individuals in ways that are likely to cause stress and ongoing emotional damage, may possibly be subject to some form of regulation.  Had this been any other institution – the police, perhaps, or the National Health Service – there would be no shortage of pious articles in the press to call for stronger, probably legally backed, regulation.  But the institution in question today is not any of these public services.  It is the institution of the press.  The privately owned, unregulated behemoth that strides unchecked across the landscape of Britain.  So fearsome is the power wielded by this institution that the Prime Minister quails before the very thought of taming it.  The man whose government is happy to attack teachers for not doing their jobs, or health professionals for failing in their duties, has steered well clear of even muttering the idea that the press might be in need of serious reform.

The phrase that leads the vocal defence of the press of itself is “freedom of the press”.  Without this crucial freedom, we are told, the country is in danger of descending into dictatorship and oppression.  Really? 

There was certainly a time when “freedom of the press” meant something.  When journalists and papers would risk everything to expose the corruption of political systems or highlight injustices in society.  Then, indeed, “freedom of the press” was an important freedom.  But today?  The reputation of the print media is so low that today’s front page of the Sun, quoting Churchill’s stirring defence of a free press in 1949, merely provoked laughter amongst friends who saw it.  Churchill, himself a journalist whose income was dependent on the munificence of press baron Lord Beaverbrook, was no impartial observer, but it can at least be suggested that his words came after the great battle against tyranny that was the Second World War.  Not that British papers even then had covered themselves in glory, with the Daily Mail parading its pro-Nazi sympathies until close to the outbreak of war itself.  And, of course, the press was anything but free during the war itself, agreeing not to publish details of military operations lest they compromise the British war effort.  No wonder Churchill was so grateful in 1949.

Today, though?  Let’s have a look at what press freedom it is that is so significant and crucial to our society that the newspapers claim they should be the only institution in Britain not subject to proper, external regulation.

The Sun’s defence of English liberty, outside of its cringing use of selected quotes from Winston Churchill, John Wilkes and Gandhi, includes a story detailing the friendship between Harry Styles and Rio Ferdinand; a report of a bust-up involving David Beckham; and the shock revelation from Gwynneth Paltrow that her marriage to Chris Martin is not perfect.  Stuff to defend the foundations of British liberty indeed.  More seriously, last Thursday – 14^th. March – the newspaper had to again publish an apology to Gordon Brown for having lied about what he said concerning that paper’s unethical use of Brown’s infant son’s medical records.  This was the fifth apology to Gordon Brown for falsehoods in under 5 months.  A real record of rigorous and accurate reporting, well worth defending with the words of Churchill.

The Daily Mail is equally loud and self-righteous in its demands today that MPs do nothing to control the nation’s foreign-owned newspapers.  The freedoms that the Mail wishes to see continue unfettered include its right to publish misleading information on health issues (for example it printed a false claim that e-cigarettes caused cancer – another in a long list of things the Mail announces as a cause of cancer); to publish false information about such prominent individuals as Christine Hamilton (apology published 4^th. March 2013); or to cover-up letters pointing out the frailty of its stories with regards to European Union directives (it made a false claim that the EU was planning to ban Famous Five books).  Today’s paper, alongside such investigative gems as Beyonce’s new track, Kim Kardashian’s difficulties with pregnancy and Khloe Kardashian’s holey jeans, offers up at least three different articles about press freedom, together with a self-serving leader.  Whether or not we really will be losing “something precious altogether”, as columnist Dominic Sandbrook suggests in the Mail today, might remain a matter of severe dispute, particularly from those whose lives have been ruined by the Mail’s peculiarly malicious brand of reporting – those such as Juliet Shaw, or the innocent Deputy Headmistress accused of having sex with a teenager.

The issue before parliament is not one about freedom of the press.  It is about abuse of its responsibility by the press.  For years now newspapers in particular have operated with impunity, and it is their over-mighty power that now needs curbing.  They have not used their power for the greater good.  They have not been the crusading campaigners for justice that they are portraying themselves today.  They have been craven, trivial, malicious, lazy and downright dishonest for the most part.  They give acres of space to opinionated and inexpert columnists whose carping, self-serving and often vindictive judgements are meant to stand as definitive testament to the work of thousands, millions even, in public service and elsewhere. 

The Leveson Inquiry wasn’t just about the extraordinary abuse of phone hacking, an abuse which now sees two of the once most powerful people in British media stand before criminal courts, but about the overall ethics of an industry which harried and persecuted all manner of people without any regard to the public interest of its stories.  The Leveson Inquiry revealed too much of the British press to have been warped by its monstrous power.  Of course it needs trimming.  The tragedy is that the cosy relationship between politicians and the press will stymie any attempt to seriously control it, whatever anaemic deal may finally be agreed between the parties.  The “freedom of the press” trumpeted today is simply the freedom to continue on a path of abuse.

Further Information:

Two blogs which do sterling work on publicising the frequent distortions and untruths that unaccountably find their way into our free media, are Tabloid Watch (who highlighted some of the examples I have used above) and the Media Blog.  It is writers and editors of blogs like these who are now the ones seeking to 'speak truth to and about power', not the over-mighty print media with its foreign domiciled owners.  I commented on the contrast between good and bad journalism here.

Do voters believe in Santa Claus?

There's a nice line from Andrew Rawnsley in his assessment of the Eastleigh impact for today's Observer.  After reviewing the list of UKIP manifesto pledges, which combine both a reduction in taxes for everyone and an increase in spending for everyone, Rawnsley says that UKIP "must be the only party to be led by people who still believe in Santa Claus".

Perhaps so.  But the greater concern is that it seems to be voted for by people with a similar belief pattern. 

Eastleigh's Lessons

That the Liberal Democrats won at all is a minor triumph for them and let no-one tell you otherwise.  This is a party which was mired in a truly demeaning scandal during the last week of the Eastleigh by-election campaign, whose media operation looked utterly out of condition and whose leader was subject to the sort of scrutiny usually reserved for pariahs and criminals.  Add to that the fact that Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems enjoy the support of not one single major media outlet, but can count on the active  hostility of all of them, and this really does start to look like an extraordinary triumph.  No leader since John Major has received quite such a pasting from the right-wing press, but at least then some papers still maintained a veneer of regard for the party Major was leading.  No such exceptionalism exists for Nick Clegg.  Any triumph he gains, any achievement he chalks up, is and always will be done in the face of an extraordinary hostility from mainstream press outlets. 

So how did the Liberal Democrats win in Eastleigh?  Two reasons I suspect.  One – their organisation on the ground is excellent.  They have a large number of councillors and activists in Eastleigh and they used feet on the ground to considerable effect.  In the age of media and social network politics, localism still counts and a motivated ground-force can still make the difference.  This is what will probably rescue the Lib Dems from oblivion in any general election.

Second – they faced the split opposition of the right, and herein lies a serious problem for the Tories.  Eastleigh was a Conservative seat not so very long ago, held by a middle-ground Tory of cautiously pro-European opinions who tragically was subject to personal demons which ultimately caused his untimely death.  In this by-election, conscious of the leering threat of UKIP, the local party fielded a Tory who could have been a poster girl for the right.  Maria Hutchings held forthright views on immigration, is a determined euro-sceptic and would have been no Cameron patsy if elected to parliament.  She is the dream candidate for those right-wing Tory MPs determined to give their party a make-over.  And she lost.  Not marginally, not by just a few votes.  She lost substantially, coming in a humiliating third to the party whose image she tried to emulate and whose implicit endorsement she tried to achieve. 

The Tories will try and draw all sorts of lessons from this defeat and most of them will be wrong.  The one thing that should stand out for them in achingly luminous colours is the reality that the right-wing vote in this country is too small to permit of two competing parties.  It is arguably too small to permit of even one successful party.  The Tories’ split identity is beginning to harm them, but that is nothing to the rump they will become if they really do draw the lesson that what the electorate in seats like Eastleigh need is a more unvarnished brand of Tory rightism.  They will never be right-wing and eurosceptic enough to appease the UKIP supporters without alienating the crucial centrist vote that all parties need to sustain themselves in government.  This is a simple matter of electoral arithmetic.  The Tories need to solve their identity problem and determine whether they are UKIP Mk 2, or a proper, broad, centre-right coalition who can appeal to disenchanted voters of the centre.

As for UKIP, they should enjoy their triumph.  They didn’t win, but they scored their best by-election result to date.  It isn’t quite as great a triumph as Nigel Farage is trumpeting.  At a time when both governing parties are hugely unpopular, this party of protest failed to wrest a seat from them.  It was a viable party of protest in Eastleigh but it couldn’t persuade enough voters that it might also be a viable party of parliament.  In their heyday, the Social Democratic Party – a party of protest which sought to extract voters from the Labour Party in much the same way as UKIP does from the Tories – managed to pull off extraordinary by-election victories in both Conservative and Labour seats.  They did it when the governing Tories were pursuing unpopular economic measures.  And they never managed to translate their extraordinary by-election success into general election success, descending into third party misery each time. 

UKIP’s achievement is less than the old SDP.  If they can’t win a seat like Eastleigh in a by-election when protest votes account for a higher than usual proportion of the electorate, then they won’t win anything in a general election.  UKIP may be pleased at their relative success, but it is still far short of promising them anything further. 

Eastleigh has produced a victor, whatever the gloom that the national pundits may be pronouncing for all parties.  That victor, to the dismay of the Conservatives, is their coalition partner.  It will keep the coalition going, but it offers no hope to the major governing party. 

Conservative Party Nemesis

The broadcast and online media are full of the Nemesis of Chris Huhne today, and some of it makes pretty tragic reading (witness, for example, the unsparing exchange of texts between Huhne and his estranged son).  However, once the personal tragedy has been covered it is the nemesis facing the Tory Party that should really garner interest.  Huhne's travails have granted them a by-election in a former Tory safe seat at just the time that the battle for the soul of Toryism is crescendoing once again. 

The rising tide of opposition to the Gay Marriage proposals and the need to placate the virtually unplacatable euro-sceptics, coupled with some pretty appalling party management in and outside parliament, have led David Cameron to this point - that a victory in Eastleigh is urgently needed, but even if it is obtained it will only stop the grumbling temporarily, not permanently.  It might also showcase the electoral problem he will face on the current boundaries in 2015.

There have been a number of perceptive commentaries on the Tory condition recently:

Matthew D'Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph outlined the problem faced by what he called the Tory MPs' 'Hogwarts tendency' in calling for better right-wing policies.  D'Ancona also produced an excellent piece on the current Tory policy problem a few weeks back.

David Skelton on Platform 10 has explained why losing the Boundary Commission vote is not the main reason why the Tories could face defeat in 2015.

Defeat in 2015 also occupied commentator and former Tory MP Paul Goodman a while back.

AS students who venture this far could check out the archive of reports on the Conservative Party by clicking on the 'Conservative Party' label in the right hand column.

Hating Politics?

Broadcaster and blogger Iain Dale posted about his growing disillusion with politics recently.  It seems to have started from a realisation that Question Time, the default programme for political obsessives, is becoming too irritating to make for stimulating viewing any more, while there's also a sense in Mr. Dale's blog entry of annoyance at the incommunicado status of some of his recently elected friends.  Let's hope he hasn't just blogged because people aren't returning his calls any more (although I know the feeling....)

Personal issues notwithstanding, he has a point about the negative impact of media reporting on politics.  We have increasingly few independent or interesting politicians at work today because of a pervasive fear that anything uttered which veers slightly off the accepted line will be reported in sensationalist fashion.  Ministers and MPs prefer to retreat into bland uniformity rather than genuinely engage in political dialogue because the world of political reporting has become so corrupted that no accurate representation of such dialogue could possibly be forthcoming.  In an era of short-term attention spans, an out of context sound-bite is everything and a considered argument nothing.  Of course, it is possible that we also just happen to have very second rate MPs, too many of whom (like all of the present party leaders) have rarely ventured outside the world of professional politics.  They have allowed themselves, through their own intellectual and political cowardice, to become the mere puppets of the media, dancing along to the ethos demanded by the print and broadcast agencies.  They do not dare to promote politics as a thinking person's activity which just might occasionally need to be controversial, and might need to address actual concerns with direct responses.

Boris Johnson is a popular politician because he does not conform to the stereotype and does things differently, as well as often speaking off-piste.  He uses this largely to become a comic vehicle, but just think of the impact someone with more serious intent could make if they had a similarly cavalier attitude towards how they were reported.  We live in an age of machine politicians, and the problem with that is when it turns us so far off the political process we forget to check in and challenge what they are doing. 

When someone like Mr. Dale - who at least has a radio show in which to promote political debate - feels turned off by politics, what hope for the rest?  Edmund Burke's famous dictum could perhaps be rephrased to suggest that "All that is required for bad laws to pass is that normal people lose interest".  Let's hope that the great political turn-off isn't too universal.

'Lincoln' Verdict

Went to see the film 'Lincoln' and penned - or blogged - this verdict.  Not wholly taken with it I fear!

Blogging For Free

There continues to be much online conversation about the evils of unpaid internships, and in particular about the willingness of high profile sites - notably the Huffington Post and the Guardian - to make use of free blogs from unpaid bloggers.

The problem can be simply stated.  There are many more people wanting to write than there are organisations willing to pay for it.  Thus, a glut of would-be opinion formers are happy to hawk their material around on free sites because at least it gives them a profile.  It is foolish to blame HuffPo or others here.  If people refused to contribute blogs to the sites - most of which remain as unread as this admirable blog - then the owners would soon need to revise their strategy.  But in the era of free internet comment that is an unlikely scenario.

My real concern over this is that good quality writing and journalism is being devalued.  Writers who articulate opinions in elegant and stimulating ways, or journalists who spend time ferreting out important stories and making them accessible to the wider public, are professional people who should expect to be financially rewarded for their labours.  Unfortunately the model of free news sites has seriously undermined this.  It seems bizarre that so many publishers are willing to make their offerings free online.  Rupert Murdoch may have been mocked for putting the Times behind a paywall, but his principle was sound enough.  His company will spend money employing the best writers, reporters and editors.  In so doing, their labours shouldn't then be hawked around free of charge on the internet.  As a consumer I should be as happy to pay for the internet commentary that I want to read as I am to fork out for a print copy of a newspaper.  Many people have praised the availability of information and opinion on the internet, but it is also in danger of devaluing and undermining the work of real craftsmen in the art of writing.

In this, I think Chris Wheal, of the NUJ's Professional Training Panel, has it right when he says of the students who produce copy for free:

“Students are misled into thinking having bylines all over the place is a good idea, so they are conned into writing for free. Potential future employers can see the difference between paid-for work and freebie sites and have little time or respect for those who place so little value on their own work that they give it away for free.”

I'm not normally a cheerleader for Rupert Murdoch.  But by maintaining that good journalism is worth paying for, he is sticking to a principle that might just save the art of the journalist from being swallowed up by the beast of free blogging forever.

Cameron's Maastricht Moment Approaches

I’m not sure ‘Fresh Start’ is quite the right name for a group of Tory MPs who are busy re-hashing what is by now a pretty hackneyed message within the Tory party.  The self-proclaimed group is publishing a report calling for the repatriation of significant powers from the EU to Britain.  So the same call that has been made by Tory MPs since Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech – a fresh start indeed.

Yet, of course, the group’s report remains newsworthy because David Cameron is himself entering the European maelstrom with a speech due on Friday that advance spin suggests will be redefining the British relationship with Europe and calling for a referendum on the terms of our membership.  Mr. Cameron is going to complete the work that John Major began with Maastricht it seems, although Mr. Major himself had rather assumed that the Maastricht agreement was an end in itself, requiring no further finesse.

The problem for Mr. Cameron is that of the few policy positions he does hold, a vague but clear Euro-scepticism is amongst them.  This is a Prime Minister held in deep suspicion by the majority right-wing of his parliamentary party, and he undoubtedly sees a new Euro-scepticism as just the sort of red meat to throw their way in order to keep them off his back over other things.  He should beware.  There is no beast so utterly single-minded and determined as the Euro-sceptic Tory MP, and they will not be appeased by some vague ideas about renegotiation.  Neither will they be too happy about what must seem a far distant prospect of a referendum on Europe under a majority Tory administration, especially given the unlikelihood of such an event.  Hatred towards Europe has become an unthinking element in the DNA of most Tory MPs, to the extent that any rational debate about it is virtually impossible, and what used to be the Tory Party’s will to power has been all but negated by the willingness of Eurosceptics to drive the party into a kamikaze approach that receives carefully expressed opprobrium from all but its own members.

Take the Obama administration.  After successful visits each way between Barack Obama and David Cameron you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a transatlantic relationship built on the strongest of foundations.  A harkening back to the glory days of Reagan and Thatcher.  Well, in the sense that Reagan consistently belied his own rhetoric by following a US self-interest that usually denied Britain its own requirements, I suppose it is.  For all the bonhomie of Cameron and Obama, the administration has not been slow in making it very clearly known that it regards Mr. Cameron’s European manouevres as unwise and potentially disastrous.  A Britain isolated from Europe will not be able to rely on any special relationship with the United States.  Their realpolitic views a single European unit as the most useful form of European ally.  Any country standing outside of that – including Britain – will be a marginalised minnow.

And the US attitudes are nothing compared to those of powerful European countries such as Germany. Gunther Krichbaum, a key CDU ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, warned of economic disaster for Britain is she stood outside the single market.  Just as British Tory euro-sceptics are vigorous and single-minded in their call for ‘renegotiation’, so most European players are equally determined that Britain cannot keep treating the EU as an a la carte menu to be picked from at will.

David Cameron is more euro-sceptic than his predecessor John Major.  He also appears to be a less effective diplomat however.  Andrew Rawnsley, in a thoughtful piece for the Observer on Sunday, recalled the tenacious and canny diplomacy of Mr. Major (“a gentleman” according to one of his European adversaries, Ruud Lubbers) which eventually yielded the opt-outs in the Maastricht Treaty.  But, as Mr. Rawnsley reminded his readers, such opt-outs benefited Mr. Major not a whit, as he watched his 1992 election triumph dissolve into the ashes of a disastrous party war which doomed it to never, thus far, winning a majority on its own terms in parliament again. 

David Cameron is not, as I’ve noted before, a leader with any deep roots in the Conservative Party.  It is one of the factors that makes him such an isolated leader.  But it would be foolhardy of him to think that he can ride the euro-sceptic bandwagon.  Europe wins few votes amongst the British electorate to whom Mr. Cameron is answerable, but a perception that Britain is an isolated, marginal figure in world affairs does have an impact, and in appeasing his unthinking right Mr. Cameron is clearly heading in that direction.  He should leave Europe alone, and look again at reinvigorating a domestic One Nation Tory policy that would have a real chance of reversing the decades long Tory electoral decline.

Wodehouse Restoratives

In this time of hardship there can be few better restoratives than regular readings of P.G.wodehouse, the undoubted master of the comic bon mot.  Happily for Wodehouse aficionados - and they are surely legion - the BBC has spent at least some of its licence fee wisely in the commissioning of a new Sunday night series based on the Blandings novels, ranking alongside the immortal Jeeves as one of Wodehouse's outstanding serial creations.  Blandings begins this Sunday.  Meanwhile, the BBC's Hugh Schofield has been given to musing about P.G.Wodehouse's French connection here.

Students and their Lectures - the University Failure

So finally a university lecturer has had a go at students for not attending lectures.  The highly regarded medieval historian Guy Halsall, who adorns the York history department, apparently let loose something of a rant that involved his expression of displeasure that too few students bothered turning up for his lectures.  He posted his views online, on the university’s virtual learning system, telling students that they had missed the chance of hearing from one of the premier medieval historians in the world, to whom conferences pay large sums of money when he goes and guest lectures.  Professor Halsall intimated that the vast sums of money being spent on a university education were being wasted.

He has a point, of course.  The fees of £9,000 a year should be starting to focus students’ attention on the real value of university education.  And while his comments may seem a little too self-regarding (although one could equally ask, why shouldn’t they?) they raise the thorny issue of just what university education is actually for.

In the great debate about school exams, we often hear media pundits and politicians suggest that it would be a rather good idea to get the input of university departments when constructing the secondary school curriculum and examinations system.  Yet it seems that university departments have enough to do sorting out their own provision rather than being used as experts for an age group they don’t teach or deal with.  The imposition of high tuition fees has focused attention on what universities are actually providing for their undergraduate students. The feedback from numerous recent undergraduates is less than inspiring.  I hear plenty of tales of poor lecturers, seminars being given by graduate students and irregular and superficial essay supervision.  On the arts side, the contact time between student and lecturer is minimal, often amounting to a total of just six hours a week (split between several lecturers) for students.  This usually includes three or four hours of lectures to large audiences, so the small group sessions may be a mere one or two hours a week.  The only exceptions are Oxford and Cambridge, who at least provide weekly tutorial or supervision sessions of one to one (or one to two) for their undergraduate students.  Compare all of this with the much maligned secondary school system, where even an undemanding A-level system requires two or three hours of lesson delivery a day, and frequently more depending on timetable vagaries. 

There were apparently some 11,000 unfilled university places in the last application cycle.  For those places that were filled, it would be surprising if there weren’t more attention being paid to just how the universities fulfil their teaching mission.

Professor Halsall’s frustration is also an interesting reflection on the student regard for university education.  For all of the violent protests against the imposition of fees, it seems that students still cannot be bothered to turn up to a lecture by an international authority in his field.  If students really were bothered about their value for money, the least they would be doing would be attending the specific lectures and seminars laid on for them.  Perhaps, after all, the fact that such fees won’t be paid until well into their working life has engendered a sense of ennui towards their academic studies?  Perhaps too  the universities should stop putting lectures online and demand physical attendance instead, much as the school system does?  Are they worried that such demands might reduce even further the number of students who survive to graduate at the end of a third year?

We clearly haven’t got the university system right.  The teaching in too many is abysmal and the reaction from students seems to be to limit their exposure to it as much as possible, whilst happily committing themselves to their eventual £27,000 pay back.  Outside Oxford and Cambridge, it is rare to hear of students extolling the virtues of their academic studies.  More is learnt in the clubs and the bars than in the lecture halls.  We may wonder indeed just what the virtue of a university education is.  Perhaps instead of constantly sniping at secondary schools, who are at least delivering education to the nation’s under-18s on a daily basis, it would also be worth reviewing the set-up of the education that the state expects to be provided after 18.  It would save an awful lot of money if we finally regarded it as being unnecessary.

2013 looks bad for the Tories, but not as bad as 2015.

The Tories will be in government until 2015, spats with the Lib Dems notwithstanding.  In 2015, all the available arithmetic suggests they will lose, as Paul Goodman shows in this admirably clear article.  It can't help that a segment of the Tory core vote, it's older and more right-wing element, are defecting in mind - and sometimes in body - to UKIP.  This would have been good news for the modernisation of the Tory brand if such a process were still going on, but it isn't, a strategically catastrophic mistake as Matthew D'Ancona writes here in a first class analysis of the Tories' public problem.

Goodman indicates that one demographic factor working against the Tories is their very low showing amongst ethnic minority voters, who are becoming a larger proportion of the voting population.  This would have been one area which modernisation sought to address.  The real issue for the Tories is that while voters continue to regard them with suspicion as an as yet unreformed party, its own hard-core supporters do not share that view and have headed to what they think is a revanchist Conservative Party in UKIP.  When he abandoned modernisation, David Cameron had not completed the process of de-toxifying the Tory brand in the eyes of the unaligned public.  But neither did he hunker back to the right and thus at least retain the surety of hard-core support.  This latter option would never be a winning strategy though; even with the added ex-Tory support UKIP will score marginally in any general election, in proportion to the broad popularity of unadulterated right-wing policies.

The real decision for Cameron is how and when to get his modernising agenda back on track while he is still able to make a difference in government.  He is man with shallow roots in Conservatism, possibly one of the reasons why his members have so signally failed to take him much to their hearts.  He arrived too slickly, too cleanly to the top, with too little of the mud of party activism gripping to his fingers, to be much appreciated by the hoary-handed sons and daughters of Tory toil.  He could have been forgiven for this if he had then done what Tories expect from their leaders - been supremely competent in his execution of government.  Alas, he hasn't.  He has too often seemed swept by the buffeting winds of political chaos with little idea of how to anchor himself down for a bit.  And the more he gets buffeted, the more it looks as if he is leaving a space for the return of the ideologues.  D'Anconca puts the issue of Toryism and ideology very neatly here:

In general, however, the global financial crisis has had a stultifying effect upon Conservative discourse. It has restored to respectability the myth that politics is really a branch of economics; the myth that confuses the complex, multi-faceted voter – who contains multitudes – with that predictable two-dimensional creature, homo economicus. The risk is one of “ideological creep”: when an entirely practical mission to improve the lot of Britons in 2012 and beyond starts to acquire a doctrinal veneer, and to look like the work of Tory Jacobites, ideological restorationists determined to continue the “unfinished revolution” of the 1980s.

There was a time when patrician responsibility animated the Conservative will to power. Its place has been taken by ideology: a simmering brew of Friedman, Hayek and a bit of Burke for old time’s sake. If modernisation has a central purpose, it is to remind the party that ideology is never enough. Those afflicted by doctrinal certainty are generally impervious to what people think of them.

As of the end of the year, David Cameron hasn't been able to articulate through words or actions what that classic Tory solution, D'Ancona's "patrician responsibility", can provide.  If he ends 2013 by having allowed the ideologues back, then he may still have a year or so left in government,  but with 2015 still to come he probably needs to get ready for electoral wipe-out.  Again.