Nick Clegg at the Sage

Yesterday (Saturday) saw Nick Clegg visit the Sage, Gateshead in the latest in his ongoing series of ‘Town Hall’ events to meet the people.   Fortunately, both my wife (a floating voter) and I were free so, along with many others, we went to hear what he had to say. 

As might be expected it was a generally confident performance.  He was comfortable and in command with questions dealing with civil liberties in any way and was wonderfully dismissive of Labour and Tory posturing.  However, on a few questions his answers were not as crisp or well worked out as they really need to be if the Lib Dems are seriously to challenge for power.   I have set these out below as well as I can from memory (giving them purely arbitrary numbers for convenience) along with my comments in italics.

Q1:  A woman asked a confused question about immigration and Europe made doubly confusing because she kept interrupting Nick as he tried to answer.  It wasn’t clear to me exactly what her concern was; I suspect she didn’t really know herself but has been reading too much of the Murdoch press.   Nick’s answer, dealt mainly on the economic benefit of ‘good immigration’ pointing out that all parties in Scotland want more.  Only at the end did he briefly get onto Europe explaining that it was crucial for our exports and fighting crime – mentioning a case where pan-European co-operation had been vital in smashing a paedophile ring.    We need a grown-up debate on immigration.  Too many of the economic advantages claimed exist only because we so utterly fail to develop domestic talent at all levels of society leaving us dependent on ‘imports’ amidst continuing unemployment.  The fact is that recent levels have been wildly unsustainable putting the Party’s ‘free trade’ wing on a potentially different course to its green wing.  This needs creative resolution.   Europe should be a strength for the Lib Dems but policy driven by internationalist sentiment has made it a problem.  Nick does not appear to recognise that the mess served up by the EU’s undemocratic establishment is not the only option; we could instead devise and argue for a different – liberal – vision.   Supporting the status quo leaves him supporting, if only by default, what should be attacked at every turn.  I’m thinking the democratic deficit, the CAP and the fisheries policies for instance. 

Q2:  A man made the point that Gateshead is blighted by a long-running dispute between a supermarket and that many other town centres have been devastated by their arrival.   Nick identified with this problem very strongly on the basis of experience in his own constituency and elsewhere where supermarkets have deployed armies of legal experts against councils.  He was very clear that planning law needs to be reformed to include a competition test to prevent abuse.  Hmmm.  Wrong answer.  It is perverse to use planning law to prevent anti-competitive practices; we should use competition law for this!  (Planning law does need overhauling but that’s another story).   The difficulty is that we have remarkably poor competition law in this country made all the more useless by a received wisdom in recent years that regulation should be ‘light-touch’ – meaning to those charged with enforcing it ‘actually none - it’s only for show’.  Around three years ago the ‘All Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group’ documented startling abuses that ought to have had a fair few directors going to jail in any country with an aspiration to fairness.  The enforcement result: nothing, the moral hazard: extreme.

Q3:  Someone asked about tax rises and efficiency savings and how the numbers add up.  Nick quite adroitly managed to explain that of the much publicised £167 billion deficit around £100 bn was cyclical and would sort itself out as the economy recovered leaving about £60-£70 that was ‘structural’ and had to be found from tax rises and savings.   This is the conventional view and I really, really hope it’s right.  The difficulty is that it derives is from the same economists who so signally failed to see the crisis coming because the neoclassical school of economics (to which the overwhelming majority of government and academic economists subscribe) has within it no coherent theory of money or credit; transactions are regarded as essentially barter; although money and credit are obviously involved they cancel out.  Not very helpful in a credit crunch!    This is not a regular recession it is a depression and it is quite possible that there is little or no cyclical element, that the economy has stalled.  That’s a scary thought.  (Going beyond the meeting itself I am hearing that both Labour and Conservatives are thinking in terms of getting increased efficiencies from further development of larger back offices, this is a really bad plan that will fail for sure.  For what they need to do see my last post before this one).

Q4:   A girl expressed her concern – based apparently on what her friends working in the NHS tell her – about the growing number of managers and so on.  Nick agreed strongly saying the number of managers and administrators now exceeds the number of beds but that nurse numbers were little changed. He agreed with the questioner that this was a worry and should change.   His one specific idea was that the Strategic Health Authorities could be abolished although I was unclear whether this was policy or just something to think about.   I have no doubt that there are huge savings to be made – my friends also tell me absolutely hair-raising stories of lax management but this was very worrying; merely agreeing that there is a problem is hardly a vote-winner.  What would the Lib Dems do?  We need to be specific about how we would change the management to be more effective and that means getting down and dirty in the detail where the devil is.  I don’t expect to see the details of this paraded as ‘policy’ but I do want to get a sense that someone knows what to do rather than just presiding over an ongoing disaster.  The Country is looking for leadership.    

Q5:  A man expressed extreme concern about the lack of wealth creation in Britain, in particular the bad state of manufacturing.  Many components have to be imported and vital skills are being lost or are at risk.  Nick agreed this is a worry.  He strongly attacked RBS for financing Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury and strongly critizised the banks for not making adequate loans – the ‘lifeblood of industry’ – available on affordable terms.  Beyond that he had little to say.  What he said amounted to the more or less conventional platitudes of the recent past and I was left feeling that Nick and his advisors don’t really understand the question.  To be fair it’s an immense and multi-faceted problem, one that has eluded UK governments for over 100 years as we have gradually declined as an industrial power – but it’s not insoluble.

Nick’s overall performance was very creditable; if the selection above suggests otherwise it is because it picks out where he was weakest.  And if he is a bit weak on these points then Labour and the Conservatives are even weaker.  Unfortunately, the Country needs leadership on a Churchillian scale at this time.  To lift his score from a ‘B’ to an ‘A+’ he needs to learn to identify which things are really important and then to find people inside or outside the Party who can tell him (and us) how to tackle them.

My wife remains a floating voter.

Freedom matters

As a Liberal a belief in the importance of freedom has always been pretty central to my political philosophy.  There are many reasons why I dislike the authoritarian instincts of Conservatives or the meddlesome top-down approach of Labour but many of these come back to the central importance of freedom in the final analysis.

I’m not fundamentalist about it - freedom is not the only value in my universe - but without a large measure of both political and economic freedom we are all poorer – both literally and metaphorically.

So I naturally agree with a cry for freedom that reminds us that, 

The founding texts of the English Constitution – charter, petition, bill of rights – have one thing in common: they create nothing.  They assert old freedoms; they restore lost harmony.  In this they guided America’s Revolution, itself a codification of earlier colonial liberties.”

But herein lies a difficulty.  For the author is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in the Telegraph of all places and the subject of his attack is the Lisbon Treaty which came into force earlier this week.   As he puts it,

Europe’s Constitution – the Lisbon Treaty, as we know it – began as a sort of Magna Carta.  EU leaders agreed at Laeken in 2001 that the Project needed restraining…   People do not want Europe inveigling its way into “every nook and cranny of life”, they said.  Needless to say, insiders hijacked the process …  The text says much about the heightened powers of EU bodies, but scarcely a word to restrain EU bailiffs and constables.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights … asserts that the EU has the authority to circumscribe all rights and freedoms…  In other words, our Magna Carta has been superceeded.

He concludes that in doing so the EU has crossed a subtle line and is no longer legitimate.  I agree.

And for my money that precipitates the EU into a crisis – but it is a crisis of ideas as well as of legitimacy as the Economist’s Charlemagne blog pointed out this week in a post headed “Europe: where are the big ideas?”   He quotes with approval Jacques Delors, the former European Commission boss,

“But we are not making any proposals … and to propose something, there has to be much more co-operation between us.  But no, everyone is in their own corner. Germany is run from Berlin, France has turned into “Greater France” and Britain is more and more anti-European…  If Europe does not take care, within ten years we will have a world run by two powers: the United States and China.”

He goes on to quote Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the Socialist Group,

“The old democratic contract is broken. Globalization has taken sovereignty away from the nation state, leaving people vulnerable to forces outside their control. Europe is the only means to regain this lost sovereignty and to empower people once more. But if we do not act now, the danger we face is the withdrawal of democratic consent from the European project. It will happen slowly but surely if we do not change the way we do politics.”

 Perhaps the best summary comes from one of the comments (rewt66),

It seems to me that there are two Europes.

There is the Europe of the liberal democratic tradition, of the rule of law, of stable institutions, and of transparent and accountable government.

And then there is the EU, which essentially decided to force a constitution down the throats of those that didn’t like it. (“Ireland voted against? That’s unacceptable. They’ll just have to vote again. Nothing will be permitted to block this constitution – certainly nothing so trivial as a democratic vote!”) The EU creates a maze of bureaucracy (so much for transparency) and removes the decisions further from the people (making accountability harder).

It seems to me that the EU is, if not diametrically opposed to the best traditions of Europe, then at least not fully in keeping with them.

So what is going on?   In which direction does salvation lie?

The answer, I suggest is that we must rediscover our ancient freedoms and insist that the EU is remodelled to comply with them.  It means a Europe where power is clearly understood to be delegated upwards, not downwards and where bureaucrats are servants, not masters – in short a Europe where democracy (and hence legitimacy) is restored.

All of which is a little difficult for the Liberal Democrats.  In theory the party is fully subscribed to the idea that freedom should be a guiding principle, in practice the it is so clueless it has blundered into supporting the exact opposite.   Tragically, Nick Clegg and his coterie have not understood that there are different ideas about how Europe should work; instead of working up alternative proposals based around freedom and democracy they have naively swallowed the establishment party-line that ‘there is no alternative’ (shades of Margaret Thatcher) and, in limply surrendering to the establishment framing, they have lost the battle.

It has also left the Liberal Democrats in a terrible mess as a party that thinks it believes in freedom but actually promotes the opposite.  

We have by far the best and most trusted economic brain in Parliament at a time when that really matters, we regularly win local elections all round the country and the two big parties both looking utterly unconvincing;  yet despite all this we are nevertheless managing to flatline in the opinion polls?  Is there a connection between this lack of support at national level and our muddled message on freedom.  You Bet!   Not that it’s the only factor, but it’s certainly an important one and if we want to move forward and actually be a liberal party it’s one we have to resolve.

For one thing is certain; the ancien regime is dead – the political leadership is preoccupied with chasing poll ratings, the bureaucrats are consumed by office politics and the theologians have gone for the intellectual drivel that is neoclassical economics.   Do we, as a party, want to join the dead establishment or lead the revolution?   If the latter, we must lift our game but I see little evidence of this so far.

Nick Clegg on World at One

Nick Clegg gave an excellent interview on the collapse of EdF’s bid for British Energy on today’s World at One.

He welcomed the collapse as an opportunity to rethink the whole [energy] strategy instead of selling off British assets at a cut price to pursue its nuclear strategy.  He also commented that, as I have argued in previous posts, there is simply not enough competition in the UK energy market with too much power concentrated in too few hands.

Quite right!