Politics News and Discussion

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9236571/Commons-live-David-Cameron-faces-questions-over-Jeremy-Hunt.html

What a strange, almost hallucinatory time it has been. At home, we have been coping with the death of my father, Jack Ashley, while watching the extraordinary turmoil at the Leveson inquiry. Amid the blur of kind letters and emails, not to mention 9,000 sympathetic messages on Twitter, I’ve been thinking hard about one political life, and what it meant; and I hope readers will forgive me if I try to use it as a prism through which to analyse the current political crisis.

In a few short months, Lord Justice Leveson has moved on from phone hacking to the wider story of relations between the Tory-led government and the Murdoch empire; and the wider-still issues of the proper, or improper, relationship between the media in general and the political class. David Cameron denies a grand deal or bargain – media support from Murdoch in return for business favours – but polling strongly suggests the public have decided that this lot, at least, are no longer on their side.

My father’s career as a Labour MP, and then a peer, will always be intertwined with how he coped with sudden total deafness when newly elected, in 1967. But his campaigning for more than four decades was full of more general, and urgent, lessons for today’s politicians. And one of them was the right way to deal with journalists.

For it was, after all, a sometime Murdoch newspaper editor with whom he formed a crucial alliance in his most famous campaign, to win compensation for Thalidomide-damaged children from the Distillers Company. In the early 1970s, my father and Harry Evans of the Sunday Times worked together, using parliament, the courts and public opinion to win a long and bitter battle. He would always tell us the real heroes were the families themselves – and remind us that the battle to support the nearly 500 people born with horrific disabilities isn’t over yet.

Yet this remains a classic example of what can happen when politicians and journalists work together. Evans is still one of the best examples of an old-fashioned campaigning journalist who turned his paper into a prime forum for harassing the smug and powerful, and trying to right wrongs on behalf of the relatively powerless. And what happened when his paper, and its sister, were taken over by a certain Rupert Murdoch? Soon afterwards, Evans was pushed out of the Times’s editorial chair in a row over proprietorial interference; Evans demolished Murdoch’s account of this in the Guardian last week.

My father worked with a lot of journalists, along with pressure groups and charities, on a lot of campaigns – to change the laws on disability, the treatment of rape victims, to help vaccine-damaged children, victims of army bullying and of domestic abuse, and many more. He was a charismatic man, and found good reporters and editors to work with in many different organisations. But the problem is that once proprietors are dealing in a regular, close way with prime ministers, their papers are inherently less likely to challenge power, to rage and fight, and therefore to stand up for those who need them most.

It has only recently been revealed that Murdoch held a secret meeting with Margaret Thatcher ahead of his 1981 takeover of the Times and the Sunday Times. That set a powerful precedent: to be a successful leader in this country, you had to do your deal with the greatest media boss of all. Following Thatcher, Blair, Brown and Cameron all did the same; and what we are seeing at Leveson is the unwinding of the consequences of all this.

We should never forget that without the Milly Dowler phone-hacking story, and the relentless pursuit by a Guardian journalist – ridiculed and vilified at the time – all this subterranean dealing would have remained hidden, and I bet that the Murdoch family would have got everything they’d wanted.

But my larger worry, going back to my father’s career, is that it’s almost impossible to have effective parliamentary politics – that is, challenging, probing, campaigning politics – on behalf of outsiders, if the media is a smug insiders’ club. We need a vigorous, plural, independent media or our politics dies too.

And one reason for public suspicion is that, as compared to the Britain of the 70s where Dad fought his key early campaigns, today’s Britain seems much more of a stitched-up country, where the wealthiest and most powerful are in perpetual collusion. This is, unavoidably, about class as well as character. Why did Dad connect so readily to people at the bottom of the heap, in desperate trouble, and why was he so contemptuous of the business bosses and judges he thought stopped them getting justice? It is, of course, a result of the long years he spent as an unskilled labourer working in chemical and copper factories, and before that his childhood in a tiny, leaking house, with no hot water or inside toilet.

He got his break through a trade union scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, even though he had left school at 14. Now we’re told that Labour’s union link is outrageous and corrupt; but what other organisations help get working-class people into parliament? We need a Commons that reflects the country, with a far greater range of backgrounds than today’s – as Neil O’Brien argues on the opposite page – just as we need a genuinely independent media. With strong journalism and MPs who understand what it’s like to struggle, backbenchers really can change people’s lives for the better. Without them, parliament starts to feel like a fig leaf for things-as-they-are – and if that seems too alarmist, look at the polling right now.

It isn’t all bleak, of course. Parliament may have far too few working-class members, but for now it does have a strong group of independent-minded backbenchers, across all parties. And there must be a chance that online journalists and campaigners will fill the gap left by newspapers in thrall to commercial interests, and the terrible cull of local journalism. That, of course, would require more than a day of Twitter trending, or flash-mob enthusiasm: good campaigning means digging, patience, and consistency.

My father’s life showed that MPs do not operate in a parliamentary vacuum. They need to work with networks outside – and this includes good journalists, who don’t have to look over their shoulders at proprietors, or worry about their editors’ chummy chats with ministers. The Leveson inquiry isn’t about criminality, or one minister, or even one proprietor: it’s really about what kind of democracy we still have.

Twitter: @jackieashley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/30/politicians-media-my-late-dad-jack-ashley

Boris Johnson turned down an invitation to be interviewed yesterday by the London section of the BBC’s flagship Sunday Politics show, despite his only serious rival for the mayoralty Ken Livingstone appearing last week and Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones previously. Why? According to Kit Malthouse, Boris’s deputy for policing, who substituted for the mayor, Boris couldn’t make it because of a “long-standing engagement that he had to do this morning.” Malthouse claimed that BBC London had been told this in March.

Malthouse also described it as, “a private engagement this morning,” but didn’t say what time in the morning. However, Twitter has enabled us to learn what Boris was doing during the period when the Sunday Politics show was broadcast.

Boriswatch has pulled together links from a series of tweets posted by people relaying sightings of Boris on the streets of south west London campaigning. The first of these tweets was launched at 11:42 a.m. and the last at 1:27 p.m. The Sunday Politics began at noon and the London section containing the live interview with Malthouse at 12:30 pm – slap bang in the middle of the time range in which the tweets occurred.

Here are the tweets in chronological order of posting, complete with links.

11:42 a.m.: “Boris Johnson campaigning outside Wimbledon station with his entourage,” wrote @paulwildthing.

11:50 a.m.: “Boris Johnson is in wimbledon having Maccy D’s. Classy guy,” wrote @hairymonkeyboy.

11:52 a.m.: “Boris Johnson just shook my hand whilst I was eating chicken curry in Wimbledon,” wrote @Awkward_Ostrich. This tweet his a photo of Boris too.

11:52 a.m.: “Boris fucking Johnson is following me around Wimbledon,” reported @angrypickin.

12:06 p.m.: @DarkBeige posts a photo of Boris with the message: “Boris Johnson, Wimbledon shopping centre.”

So that’s five sightings in Wimbledon. By the time the last of these was posted, The Sunday Politics national show had begun. What did Boris do next? Well, just as his deputy Malthouse was getting settled in the studio to take questions from BBC London’s political editor Tim Donovan on his boss’s behalf from 12.30, Boris appears to have been making his way from Wimbledon to the Bentall shopping centre in nearby Kingston.

1.16 p.m.: “Boris stops traffic in Kingston’s Bentalls Centre!,” cried @CharlotteV, with photograph to prove it.

1:21 p.m.: “Just spotted Boris Johnson while shopping (obviously!) in Kingston,” reported @DebbieDresses

1.25 p.m.: Another photograph of Boris is accompanied by the words, “Boris Johnson is here in Bentalls Kingston,” from @najeebster

1:27 p.m.: “Just walked past boris Johnson in Kingston,” revealed @Redkez.

And finally…

1:33 p.m.: “Just bumped into Boris Johnson in Kingston,” tweeted @caroline_evans

Malthouse, remember, spoke of Boris having a “private engagement” during the morning. Boris’s activities in Wimbledon and then Kingston were plainly anything but private. It seems fair to assume, therefore, that said “private engagement” finished early enough for Boris to have been at Wimbledon station at or before the time of his first tweet mentioning him being there, which was made at 11:42.

So what was stopping Boris from being at Millbank, Westminster, where the Sunday Politics interview took place in time for a 12:30 start if he’d really wanted to be? Even if his “private engagement” had been completed as late as, say, 11:30 somewhere very adjacent to Wimbledon station he could probably still have made it. Any earlier or nearer and it would have been easy.

It seems from those tweets that the reported “private engagement” almost certainly did not clash with the Sunday Politics interview slot. If so, what is the real reason Boris did not do it?

I think it perfectly reasonable for prominent politicians to have private engagements and wrong of journalists to believe such politicians should be always at their beck and call. But to decline to accept scrutiny of your record in office by the most authoritative programme on London politics on television four days before seeking re-election when it appears that your schedule could have allowed it, strikes me as deeply unsatisfactory.

Yes, I’m minding my language here.

You can watch Boris’s deputy defending Boris’s record here, from 30 minutes in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/davehillblog/2012/apr/30/boris-johnson-boriswatch-sunday-politics-interview-refused

The real political changes of the past 25 years or so have not taken place at general elections, but within the political parties.

 

First, there was the destruction of ‘Old Labour’ in the early 1980s by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. These bodies, using such tactics as mandatory reselection, got rid of or drove into the SDP many Labour MPs who were morally and socially conservative. At national level, left-wing factions in the big trades unions, marshalled by the Communist party’s skilled and well-connected industrial organisation, won victories on policy (particularly defence and foreign policy) out of all proportion to the number of Communists and Communist sympathisers in the union movement.

 

So, in the years following Jim Callaghan’s general election defeat in 1979, the Labour Party was transformed, permanently, from top to bottom. Much of this was the work of Communist sympathisers, who had since the days of Lenin supported Labour ‘as the rope supports the hanged man’, and encouraged sympathisers to join Labour and stay out of the CP, the better to penetrate the Labour Party at the highest and lowest levels. Much less was the work of various kinds of Trotyskyists, but the media were obsessed with the insignificant role of the ‘Militant Tendency’ a front organisation and code name for tiny Trotskyist sect called the Revolutionary Socialist League, mainly concentrated in Liverpool. A major Communist Party, of the kind which operated in France and Italy, was not what Lenin and the Comintern wanted. They had long sought to take over the Labour Party instead.

 

Old labour knew all about this, and the party’s organisation until the 1970s was well-trained in detecting and frustrating Communist party infiltration. William Rodgers’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism successfully defeated attempts to win Labour for the (pro-Soviet) cause of unilateral nuclear disarmamament. Ex-Communists, such as the Electricians’ Union leader Frank Chapple (he left over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956) had no illusions at all about the CP’s methods and fought them without mercy (the CP never forgave him for exposing pro-Communist ballot-rigging in the union).

 

But these forces were weakening by the early 1980s, and the New Left of the CLPD and the LCC bypassed the old defences. There were also the new ‘Euro-Communists’, of ‘Marxism Today’, Communist Party members who had forsaken the rigid Stalinism of the old party and argued instead for a flexible, post Soviet, Gramscian approach – cultural and social revolution, not Bolshevism.  Some of the cleverer Trotskyists had found their way to the same place. These became the nucleus of Blairism, which was never ‘Right-Wing’ at all. Labour’s Right Wing was by then completely dead.  The New Left were bitterly hostile to the noisier, less subtle Trotskyists (such as Militant) and were happy to see Militant crushed by Neil Kinnock, a victory for the classical, subtle left over the radical, honest left. Fleet Street, in its usual idiotic way, portrayed Neil Kinnock’s crushing of  Militant as the end of the Left in the Labour Party. This ludicrous myth, the opposite of the truth,  is still widely believed. Ha ha. Actually, the whole of British politics would as a result shift decisively to the Left as a result.

 

The transformation of the Tory Party was less intentional. By bypassing the party organisation,  wooing big donors and using the Murdoch Press and Saatchis to appeal directly to the electorate, and by  creating a ‘leader’ who was a national semi-Presidential figure, Mrs Thatcher and her allies created a vacuum where traditional Toryism had been. The party machine atrophied. The power and significance of the leader hugely increased. But if the leader was weak, he was vulnerable. John Major became the prisoner of Michael Heseltine because of his weakness.

 

As for the even weaker Iain Duncan Smith,  it was astonishingly easy for the media to ally with Michael Howard to overthrow IDS . Mr Howard then began a process of centralising the party, and delayed the election of his success for long enough to give David Cameron the edge over David Davis, which he would never have done in a quick contest,  and – as exemplified by his action against Howard Flight for remarks made at a private meeting – sought to end the control which local associations had over candidate selection.

 

Now we see (as reported in ‘The Guardian’ on Monday 30^th April) that a group of Tory MPs have magically teamed up to remove old-fashioned, traditional Tory MPs, such as Christopher Chope and Peter Bone, from the leadership of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers.

 

As the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt puts it:  â€˜A conversation among a couple of colleagues mushroomed into the 301 Group – the number of parliamentary seats needed to secure a majority in the next parliament – which attracted 135 Tory MPs to a meeting in January.

‘The group will on Monday show it is reshaping the Conservative parliamentary party when it takes the distinctly un-Tory step of publishing a slate of candidates for the elections to the executive of the 1922 committee. Candidates of all ages and intakes will be put forward to modernise the “antique” backbench committee, which has a hierarchical structure whereby new MPs have to defer to longer-serving colleagues in the weekly meetings.

‘ “Quite often, certainly senior members of the 1922 have seen the prime minister and the government as the opposition,” says Hopkins, who is driving the changes but is not standing for election. “That is not the way to go about it. They should be challenged.’

 

Or, as I might put it, the remaining conservatives in the Conservative Party are to be marginalised.

 

Will the voters notice? Some will, but millions, I fear, will continue to vote for a party that hates them, just as millions of Labour voters have been doing since the 1980s. And the enxt general election like the last four, will be a non-contest among parties which have no serious differences among them.

 

 

 

 

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/04/how-politics-really-happens-another-internal-putsch.html

DUE TO TECHNICAL ERROR, FIRST THOUGHTS WAS LATE PUBLISHING.

The bin Laden killing, one year later – how quickly things change … Republicans cry foul that Obama campaign is using the death as a reelection weapon … Foreign policy vs. the economy (it’s still the economy) … Is Obama the Warrior in Chief? … Another veep tryout – this time it’s Romney with New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte. … Gingrich to drop out Wednesday.

Believe it or not, tomorrow marks a year since Osama bin Laden was killed. We wrote then: “While it’s doubtful that Osama bin Laden’s death will have as long of a political impact [as 9/11] — especially in this fast-changing, short-term memory media landscape — it will surely shape the contours of next year’s presidential race. … Last night changes everything (for now), but we also know how quickly it can dissipate.” And dissipate it did. The president’s bump – for something that was as big a singular accomplishment that any president could have — was short-lived, because of the economy and the debt-ceiling fight. It’s a reminder of just how important the economy is that the bump was never as big as it would have been under normal circumstances. (By the way, NBC’s Rock Center went inside the decision making of the killing of bin Laden. Brian Williams previewed his interview with the president on Meet the Press. The full show, with interviews of others that were in the room) airs Wednesday at 9:00 pm ET.

Caption: NBC’s Domenico Montanaro discusses the politics of the one year anniversary of the Osama Bin Laden raid, and New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte gets a look as a possible vice president for  Mitt Romney.

*** Playing politics: Republicans are crying foul at the Obama campaign’s touting of the killing (and using it in a campaign video charging that Mitt Romney might not have made the same call. There are two lines of attack: (1) Republicans are trying to minimize the accomplishment, saying anyone would have done it; and (2) They say he’s politicizing everything, including foreign policy. Ed Gillespie, an adviser to the Romney campaign and former Bush adviser said on Meet the Press: “This is one of the reasons President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history. He took something that was a unifying event … and he’s managed to turn it into a divisive, partisan, political attack. … I think most Americans will see it as a sign of a desperate campaign.” It’s fascinating to watch Democrats try to demagogue foreign policy, the way Republicans do and have done over the years (see Cheney, Dick in 2004). Republicans usually find themselves almost overreacting when Democrats go over the top in their foreign policy attacks. Count on some REALLY heated cable and Twitter rhetoric this week on this topic as the run-up to the bin Laden anniversary kicks in.

Saul Loeb / AFP – Getty Images

President Barack Obama speaks to troops at Third Infantry Division Headquarters at Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Georgia, on April 27, 2012, prior to Obama signing an Executive Order to protect them from deceptive targeting by educational institutions.

*** Warrior in Chief? The Romney campaign has pushed the issue of foreign policy, trying to paint Obama as weak and appeasing (especially when it comes to Iran). The GOP would have liked to paint the picture of Obama as a feckless, weak president, lacking strength. But despite the rhetoric, Obama’s foreign policy has been incredibly muscular. In fact, Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation in the New York Times Sunday Review provocatively casts President Obama as the “Warrior in chief,” ticking off several of Obama’s foreign-policy raids, killings, and use of drones. The death of bin Laden undercut any hopes Republicans had of being able to paint Obama as Jimmy Carter. And he makes the point of this disconnect: “Despite countervailing evidence, most conservatives view the president as some kind of peacenik. From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership….” Make no mistake, had it failed, that’s exactly how he would have been portrayed. Bergen writes that if Romney runs a risk when criticizing Obama on foreign policy. If he tries to portray him as “a typical, weak-on-national-security Democrat,” then “he will very likely trap himself into calling for a war with Iran, which many Americans oppose.”

 

*** McCain as top foreign-policy attack dog: Taking the lead on the attack, though, is Sen. John McCain, Obama’s 2008 opponent (who also believes Obama hasn’t had courage to act in Syria). McCain, now a Romney surrogate, said Obama’s “diminishing the memory of September 11th,” and accused him of “doing a shameless end-zone dance.” It’s a fine line. McCain clearly doesn’t mind playing this role. He says things Romney couldn’t get away with and it’s something that’s quite beneficial to Romney. If Romney said what McCain did, Romney might get ridiculed. It’s an interesting role that McCain is willing to play. It could be a preview of the role McCain might play going forward in the campaign — traditional role of VP, but on foreign policy. McCain doesn’t mind going personal with Obama, as he’s demonstrated since 2008. You can try to explain away McCain’s motives all you want, but it could be oddly effective for Romney.

USA Today’s Susan Page, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, and The Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page discuss the Romney campaign’s accusation that President Obama is politicizing the death of Osama Bin Laden.

*** STILL THE ECONOMY: But for all the talk of foreign policy and how much credit Obama deserves or whether or how he should be touting it, the most important issue this election – as it was a year ago — remains the economy. It should be like a flashing red sign – IT’S THE ECONOMY, IT’S THE ECONOMY. Jobs will get a fresh look Friday when the latest report comes out. The unemployment rate has been essentially flat for three months. Even though the rate has come down from a high of 10.0%, if the rate continues to appear not to drop very much or the trajectory seems flat, that is going to be a problem for the incumbent president. Watch the trajectory; it will tell you the whole ballgame.

*** Another veep tryout: Today’s another veep tryout with Romney and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte at 10:50 am ET. Though she’s been a senator for just two years, Ayotte served as New Hampshire’s attorney general (she was appointed by Republican Craig Benson in 2003 and RE-appointed by a Democratic governor). The Republican Party’s problems with women have been well documented over the last few months. If Romney is going to pick a woman, the most serious candidate is likely Ayotte. That is, aside from Condoleezza Rice if she wants it, and there’s no indication she does. But the shadow of Palin still looms large over the GOP pick, and the Romney team may be more risk averse because of it. But as GOP 12’s Heinze wrote last week: “Sarah Palin didn’t prove that picking a woman doesn’t help with women. Palin was simply the wrong woman.” (By the way, over the weekend, NBC’s Alex Moe reported that Newt Gingrich would officially drop out Wednesday.)

*** Obama fundraises with Clinton: There were a couple striking things at the fundraiser with President Clinton this weekend at the home of Terry McAuliffe: (1) How little Romney was mentioned. After a weekend and week of going after Romney personally, last night was more in line with where the Obama campaign was when this campaign first started — go after the entire GOP. It was more the theme of — they want to take you back, it’s their failed economic policies on steroids, not the party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt; it’s not their Republican Party. (2) This was not an ordinary Obama fundraiser speech. Here, he was trying to follow one of the Democratic Party’s best economic communicators. Obama knew he was on friendly turf, but not the friendliest turf, as he was trying to appeal to Clinton people. One Democratic source who is more of a member of Team Clinton than Team Obama described last night as kind of like a “first date” between Clinton and Obama; For the first time, this person could actually see the two of them starting to bond; It took a while for Clinton to get over 2008 but so far, things have gone well in this courtship. Two more Obama-Clinton fundraisers to go; New York and PROBABLY Hollywood.

*** A way to bring up Seamus: Don’t overlook the fact that the White House used the opportunity of the White House Correspondents Dinner — when they knew they’d get lighter coverage for what they did – put a story that they’ve struggled to put into the mainstream, quietly trying to do for months, the Seamus story. It was frankly a way to get Seamus out there. Yes, Obama made fun of himself and eating dog, but they’ll take that to get the Seamus story mainlined; They’ve been trying for months.

** Waiting on Lugar’s fate: There are just eight days until the Indiana Senate primary that could see the ouster of the most senior Republican in the Senate. AP today wonders whether Richard Lugar waited too long to brand his opponent. On Friday, the 2008 GOP presidential ticket split its endorsement – John McCain endorsed Lugar; Sarah Palin endorsed his challenger and Tea Party favorite, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. Mitt Romney said he was staying out of it. A poll aligned with Mourdock showed him up 44-39% Thursday. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette headline: “Hundreds cheer Mourdock at city rally.” The rally was organized by Tea Party Express, which has played a big role in this race.

Countdown to Indiana Senate/Wisconsin recall primaries: 8
Countdown to Wisconsin recall election: 36
Countdown to Election Day: 190 days

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http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/30/11470854-first-thoughts-the-politics-of-bin-laden-one-year-later?lite