Opportunism, thy name is Uppal

You may have heard yesterday that the Conservative Party's effort to reduce the number of parliamentary seats and equalise constituency sizes was defeated yesterday, thanks to four Conservative MPs and every other party opposing it, including the Liberal Democrats.

On the face of it, equal constituencies and fewer MPs sounds reasonable. In practice, it's a Tory plot to gain themselves and inbuilt majority. It rides roughshod over local loyalties and identities too.

Needless to say, ultra-loyalist government today Mr Paul Uppal, my local MP, was ensconced in his usual position, half-way up the Prime Minister's colon. Needlessly, I should add: despite this apparently being the PM's most passionate point of principle, he didn't bother to turn up and vote. I'm quite certain Mr Uppal voted on a point of principle and not at all because the new boundaries would dump a lot of those nasty poor slum voters and replace them with rich rural Tories from the outlying villages. Mr Uppal's majority is, of course, 691.

On that point of principle about the democratic deficit, is there not an irony in the fact that Labour and Liberal Democrat Members are often inspired by the Chartists, who voted for equal-sized constituencies? There is a perverse relationship today, in that those Members are going to go through the Lobby and vote to retain the disconnect and the democratic deficit.

This is a little rich from Mr Uppal. A number of measures to reduce the 'democratic deficit' have been proposed by the Liberal Democrats and assorted Labourites in the recent past. Indeed Mr Uppal has gone through the Lobby voted against the Alternative Vote, which would have gone a long way to reducing the 'democratic deficit' by making sure that any elected MP had the positive support of 50% + 1 vote of the turnout. (Mr Uppal received 40.7% of the vote, while his Labour opponent managed 39%.  Only 68% of the electorate bothered turning out).

Other 'democratic deficits' Mr Uppal appears not to mind include the House of Lords: not only is he opposed to a democratically-elected Upper House (surely not because he thinks he may one day be awarded the ermine?), he supports the Prime Minister's efforts to boost its numbers to almost 1000 peers. That's right: Mr Uppal wants 600 MPs elected by you and me, and 1000 unelected legislators – the descendants of robber barons, rackrent landlords, the upper management of a tiny religious sect known as the Church of England, party donors and other assorted hacks – who get a say in law until the day they die without ever having to face the judgement of the people.

And he lectures us about a political 'disconnect and the democratic deficit'. The man's an embarrassment.

Boiling over

… and not just because it's unseasonably warm.

Today is Tony Blair's turn to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. Perspicacious as Mr Leveson and Mr Jay are, I hold out no hope at all of honest or clear answers from the former Prime Minister. Tony Blair is an enigma, one of the most unpleasant and dangerous public figures of recent years.

I have no doubt that if he'd seen an opportunity in the Liberal or Conservative parties in the early 80s, he'd have joined them. Ideologically, he is the ultimate zipless politician, to adapt Erica Jong's phrase. His ideology stretches as far as allowing the rich and powerful - in business and in politics (and since he left office, himself) - untrammelled freedom. Never has it been truly said of anyone that Blair never met a rich man he didn't like. As last week's revelation that he believed middle incomes to be £50-60k per year and preferred his intuition to facts showed, he is not any kind of democrat.

His politics is entirely personal: he appealed to the public to trust his intuition; to trust him because he was 'a pretty straight kind of guy' and to replace social justice with verbless aspirations: 'equality of opportunity', 'education, education, education', 'your NHS safe in our hands': slogans which assumed that every citizen was a pushy confident bourgeois, and which opened up the public sector we voted for to the depredations of free market capital.

Blair's appeal was a kind of Teflon postmodernity: being a 'nice guy' replaced gritty political hard work; shiny corporations were automatically better than tired public services; financial speculation was better than hard work; dissenters would be punished with ASBOs and benefit cuts (at home) and bombed into submission (abroad). A general disposition towards social progressivism (such as being 'cool' with homosexuality, something I of course favour) replaced a serious social determination to rebuild Britain's social structures in favour of equality - hence the massively widened social and economic gap between the rich and poor, and the indifference towards life's losers.

Nick Cohen, a formerly leftwing war-hawk, famously supported Blair's wars on the basis that democracy is a universal right which can and should be imposed by force of arms. His Observer column this week, 'Blair's Moral Decline and Fall Is Now Complete', Cohen finally admits that Blair's massively profitable (and 'tax-efficient', as they say) work on behalf of Kazakhstan's foul dictatorship is the end of Blair's moral superiority.

Nick: what kept you? I always distrusted Blair's hard-right moralism, which seemed calculated to please The Sun (and let's not even go into Blair's craven regard for Murdoch). More specifically, I and anyone with a brain saw the Iraq war not as a democratic necessity to liberate that country's oppressed citizens, but as the reflex action of a man who knows which way the wind blows. Cohen quotes Blair to demonstrate why the Prime Minister had his support:

Blair: "There is global struggle in which we need a policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice…" 

Blair replied in admirably plain language. His commitment to democracy and human rights was absolute. Moreover, it was universal: if free elections are good enough for Britain, they are good enough for Iran and no weasel words about theocrats having their "own" version of democracy can be allowed to pass uncontested.

By necessity, Blair was also an internationalist, because, as he said in his Chicago speech of 1999, which was by some measure his finest: "We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not… we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure." 

Fine words. But a highly-paid political columnist really should have a little more nous. Blair's commitment to 'democracy and human rights' is not and never was 'absolute'. Next to Iraq is Saudi Arabia. This is the country which forbids women to appear in public without a male relative. Women can't drive or vote. Some men have recently been given the chance to vote for a pointless assembly. Religious belief is harshly policed. There are no rights pertaining to democracy: no political campaigns, no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no union rights. Torture is the state's major tool to maintain the status quo.

By any standards, Saudi Arabia was worse than Iraq and approached the condition of North Korea. I was personally inspired by Tony Blair's commitment to universal democracy and human rights. So I wrote to my New Labour MP, Rob Marris, asking him to let me know when the invasion of Saudi Arabia was scheduled, explaining my concerns about the country and my hopes for a democratic future. His reply consisted of two lines, the salient words being 'totally different', though he failed to explain why.

I know why. Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil. We depend on it. In return, they buy a lot of British weapons (mainly for show, but partly to use against their citizens), and they don't get too upset about western support for Israel, despite their obsessive anti-Semitism. Democracy is for our enemies - many of whom were our friends when their human rights abuses were less important than their preference for NATO bribes over Soviet Union ones: Saddam Hussein is a case in point.

This is Blair's 'absolute' commitment to democracy: it disappears when money and geo-politics appear, both in office and out. None of this should be a surprise. Nobody's shocked when a Tory enunciates the brutality of realpolitik. The point about Blair is that he moved the political debate away from substance towards appearance: his carefully-constructed persona was that of the modern, cool guy at ease with celebrity culture and lifestyle politics, but his few political instincts were as hard-right as any Tory. Global hegemony and casino capitalism formed the bedrock of his beliefs - anything else was negotiable. The origins and purpose of his party were embarrassing relics, quickly discarded. As he repeatedly demonstrated, 'newness' was the only signifier which mattered to him - he would constantly attack 'the forces of conservatism', by which he meant the civil service, his own party members and those they represented - not on any serious structural level, but because they were in the way of his autocratic sense that he should be able to ordain a new order without discussion, consultation or objection. Democracy at home was, to him, a drag on wealth creation and political leadership: his massive self-belief led him to assume that his every instinct (as in the average wage anecdote) was correct and any alternative view was simply obstructive for the sake of it. This is why - as his testimony at Leveson admirably demonstrates - his linguistic discourse consists of 'look' and 'y'know': he cannot and never could take scrutiny: such quirks are signs of his frustration at being questioned on anything.

Cosying up to the Murdochs of this world wasn't a burden: it was a pleasure for him, because the only people who mattered were life's winners, however they got there.

I for one welcome our new alien overlords

So: Greece has a technocratic government. So does Italy ('technocratic' in both cases meaning 'entirely unelected'). I hate being on the same side of an argument as Silvio Berlusconi, but he's right to object to the imposition of political leaders without the consent of the people. Over in Spain, they've had an election: the rather good Socialist Party has lost in a landslide to the conservative People's Party. There wasn't any battle of ideas: the Socialists were forced to promise massive austerity and the PP promised even more.

Both parties are subject to the whims of the market:

From a market standpoint, an absolute majority for the PP is just what the doctor ordered," Nicholas Spiro, of Sovereign Strategy told Reuters in London. "The risk, however, is that more retrenchment pushes the economy back into recession."

Thanks to Nick, who's one of the few money men prepared to speak the truth: the markets reject democracy. They don't need it, and sometimes it gets in the way. He also exposes the hypocrisy of the financial world: they're bankrupting countries which don't impose massive public service cuts, but when the cuts actually destroy any chance of economic recovery (I'm looking at you, Osborne), the bond markets punish governments again. It's win-win - if you're a banker.

We're used to the constant droning of the Tory phrase 'free-market democracy', the Thatcherite dream. Hopefully recent events have persuaded you that the emphasis is - and always has been - on the 'free-market' element: ever since the Chicago Boys imposed monetarism on Chile, at the invitation of its bloody dictator Pinochet, the rights of high finance to do what it wants has been paramount: the aspirations and values of mere citizens have come a very poor second. What you and I want is now immaterial.

Not, of course, that 'free market' means what you think it means. No, the term refers to the demands of Western financial institutions to operate without regulations even after taxpayers have to bail them out at the price of national bankruptcy, and the rights of Western nations to dump goods in developing countries without worrying about what happens to nascent local producers.

What we're seeing in Europe is simply what we've done to African, Asian and South American countries for 50 years. It looks a bit more civilised because the New Technocratic Elites turn up in sleek Mercedes limousines rather than tanks, but the effect is the same. The new boss is the market, which has no conscience, so long-term view, and no sense of hubris. We settled their losses and didn't reform them: why wouldn't they then embark on an orgy of profitable destruction? It's like giving an axe-murderer and Arts Council grant and sharpening his axe for him.

The Spanish, Greek and Italian governments no longer have any public duty to perform: they operate the levers at the direction of the bond markets. No doubt they tell themselves that appeasing the markets will lead to stability and the public good, but it doesn't wash. A serious system of inter-governmental lending, a fiscal structure which allows European nations to vary their interest rates to suit local conditions, and a severe curbing of bond trading will bring stability and realism to national finances. As it is, we're at the mercy of greedy young men whose idea of the future stretches as far as the annual bonus and their next line of coke.

Timber!!! Another Tory policy falls

Yes, they've finally ditched the insane plan to flog off the woods to the spivs (if you want to know what happens when Tories sell land to their businessmen mates, read Private Eye on goings on in Worcestershire's Rotten Boroughs).

The whole plot depended on the Tories' belief that we all see government as a big oppressive monster destroying our rights and infantilising us, while stopping business from innovating efficiently (i.e. stopping them paying us in bootlaces while poisoning the earth, air and water). Sometime government is like this: when the Tories, Labour and now Tories again spend our money on nuclear weapons, illegal wars and bailing out the banks which have ruined our countries in the pursuit of private gain, they are like that. But on the whole, I think most people see most of government as expressing our wishes. We want good doctors, minimum wages, health and safety rules at work, decent schools, green space, social services, libraries and so on, and we think that democratically-elected governments are the least-worst way of organising these things for maximum benefit. We can sack them if they get it wrong, and we can become the government if we really feel strongly about it.

When was the last time you saw millions of people flooding the public squares demanding less government, more privatisation and the Big Society? Never. The Eastern European masses weren't Friedmanites demanding that corporations run everything for profit - they wanted responsible government. The Egyptians don't want no government - they want a democratic one. Handing the NHS and the schools over to dodgy companies isn't democracy: it's theft.

The forests outcry is a bit of a red herring: it appeals to the romantic nostalgic Tories who no doubt bothered their MPs in exactly the way they won't over SureStart or the NHS, but it's still important. Green space is a key idea of Britishness, and the public are uncomfortable with the idea that it can or should be worked for profit by uncaring shell companies. In this instance, the state and nation are the same, and it's the Tories who failed to understand this.

Why not just sell our children

Paul Uppal is now beyond parody and - seemingly - beyond democracy and rationality.

Yesterday, the government announced its plan for local government. Underneath the bullshit claims of empowerment was an ideologically-driven attack on the notion of government of any sort.

Paul likes some of it, but he thinks it doesn't go far enough. He thinks that the only people who should make decisions about our communities are… (drum roll): property developers.

While I welcome today's statement, particularly the measures that go towards tax incremental finance, will my right hon. Friend consider making them developer led, rather than local authority led? When the measures were trailblazed in the United States a couple of decades ago, most American cities and states found that regeneration was much more effective when they were developer rather than local authority led. 

(As you might know, Mr Uppal is a property developer).

Being serious for a second, I'll point out what's wrong with this idea. Simple. Democratically-elected bodies exist solely to serve their community. They can get things wrong, and they can be sacked by the community. Developers work solely for private profit. They've got no interest in the public good. A developer's idea of a successful community might be Broad Street in the Dark Place: a dystopian hell of sex shops, fast food and drug dealing. A developer would see this as great: profitable. A decent council would see this as damaging to public health and safety. Giving control to developers logically leads to the abolition of elected bodies entirely, and I don't think he's averse to the idea.

What a massive twat Mr. Uppal is. It's come to this: polite and reasoned argument just fails in the face of such determined refusal to address anything wider than his own greed and selfishness. I'm genuinely ashamed that this benighted community is supposedly represented by such a small-minded individual.

Democracy… that would be nice

Number of elected representatives in the House of Commons: 650
Number of unelected representatives in the House of Lords: 851.
Result: an oligarchy. Cameron has (and will continue to) appoint as many of his Tory Scum friends as he likes (think Lords Young and Flight).
Even worse - he's planning to reduce the number of MPs to 600 because we 'don't need so many expensive representatives'.

Oh well, I enjoyed democracy while it lasted.

What a very exciting day (3)

I spent the morning at the Council headquarters, at a meeting of the Licensing Committee. We were there (me in a suit again) to discuss the application to open a restaurant and takeaway right underneath my flat.

It was democracy in action: councillors, legal officers, the Fire Authority, my landlord, the applicants and a local journalist. It was actually pleasant - points were made politely, discussed seriously and consensus reached. The application was granted on the basis that residents' needs are catered for and the owners seemed very willing to accommodate us. I also got the chance to moan to Environmental Health about the two nightclubs across the road, and they're already on it.

Then, I got to moan to the journalist - a nice guy - about the horribly rightwing nature of his paper, to commiserate with him on the appallingly low pay of journalists (how can anyone do a decent professional job on £20,000, the salary for a senior reporter?) and we discussed the importance of local journalism as a watchdog (honoured more in the breach than the observance).

All this was conducted with a rather sore head, unfortunately

Inauguration blues

Obama's just finished his speech. Obviously it contained all the usual stuff about the greatest nation on earth, and all his brilliant trademarks, but what really struck me was the seriousness of tone. Quoting Washington's address from the darkest moments of the Independence War was stunning - he really does appear to feel that the US is endangered by the financial, moral and environmental challenges ahead. 

He promised, of course, to spread democracy around the globe. So did Blair and Bush. What they, and I suspect, Obama meant, is capitalism for all and democracy for the unimportant or annoying. Hamas are elected, and that didn't help. The Saudis and Burmese (and the North Koreans) compete for the title of worst government, but nobody's planning to ask them when the elections are. As long as the oil etc. keeps flowing, we won't ask any awkward questions. 

Aretha Franklin was embarrassingly awful, Yo-Yo Ma and Co. were tunefully bland, and the poet (missed her name) is rather good - applause from the crowd distinctly muted.