My, my…

The chancellor, Alistair Darling, today became the most senior member of the cabinet to admit he had smoked cannabis “occasionally in my youth”.

The shock admission, from the minister best known as a “safe pair of hands”, came after the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, revealed that she had dabbled with the drug during her university days.

The disclosure - made while Ms Smith discussed the prime minister’s announcement yesterday of a review into whether marijuana should be reclassified back to class B after it was downgraded to class C three years ago - prompted an avalanche of similar admissions from her cabinet colleagues.

Look I know that with a Ministerial post comes a measure of collective responsibility, nevertheless who would expected this turn in the Labour’s “I’m Spartacus” moment.

More to point:

To the astonishment of colleagues, the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, a devout Catholic, also admitted today that she had smoked the drug as an undergraduate.

Ruth Kelly’s office confirmed that she had smoked cannabis “in her youth”. A spokeswoman said: “She recognises that it was foolish and a silly thing to do, and she stopped.”

No, I can’t quite picture Ruth skinning up on the cover of an album of Gregorian chants either, but then frankly who cares.

Yes, there’s a stench of hypocrisy around this - talk to most ordinary people who’ve toked in the past and even if they have given it up, most will happily admit to enjoying it and that the worst side-effect they ever encountered was waking up the following morning to an empty fridge.

Much more important, in terms of misinformation and propaganda is that the paragraphs that follow these less-than-stunning revelations:

The home secretary is due to formally announce the review next week as part of a wide-ranging drugs inquiry that in part reflects concern about skunk, a stronger form of cannabis being blamed for an increase in mental health disorders.

Now, I will dig out something I can post in full, but having taken a look at several research papers on the subject of cannabis and mental health, the most striking think about these statements in the press is the wholesale absence of two very important words that appear routinely in the research literature:-

Pre-existing Liability.

Every single research paper I’ve read that examines cannabis use in the context of claims that increases the risk of serious mental health problems such as schizophrenia and psychotic disorders notes that the increased risks that have been identified are found only in those with a pre-existing liability towards those disorders, a predisposition that researchers strongly suspect has genetic origins.

Got that? The current state of play in the research is that there is an increased risk of mental health problems arising out of cannabis use in individuals who possess a genetic predisposition toward experiencing such problems.

The precise genetic and biochemical factors that come into play and the prevalence of such pre-existing liabilities in the general population are both, as yet, unknown, although researchers have identified at least two promising lines of enquiry on the causative factors, both of which require more research before anything definitive can be said.

So far as I can see from the published literature, our current understanding of the precise relationship between cannabis use and mental health problems amounts to a couple of promising hypotheses which suggest that an as yet unquantified segment of the general population might be at greater risk of developing certain psychological disorders for which they have a genetic predisposition if they toke on a regular basis, especially while an adolescent.

If that’s the medical argument for reclassifying cannabis upwards, then one might just as easily justify classifying peanuts as a class A substance on grounds of the increasing prevalence of of peanut allergies in recent years on much the same basis but on the back of considerable more solid research evidence.

Politicians toking during their university days - who cares anymore.

Propaganda and misinformation on the real scale and understanding of the risks involved in cannabis use - that’s the real scandal here.

Time for a video… (NSFW)

Following hot on the heels of the Jonathan Isaby’s gaff in publishing what he claimed were unofficial vote tallies taken by a member of the Tory Campaign team in Ealing Southall during the verification of postal ballots, a second national newspaper appears to have repeated Isaby’s gaff.

Visit in the Independent on-line this morning, and you’ll find its lead by-election story for Ealing Southall is the on-going police investigation into Isaby’s blog post, which appeared on the Telegraph’s website at 6pm yesterday evening.

Ealing Southall: Police to investigate Tories over leaked postal by-election results

By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
Published: 19 July 2007

The Conservative Party found itself at the centre of a police investigation last night after allegations a “Tory source” had leaked results of a postal ballot of today’s Ealing Southall by-election.

Scotland Yard confirmed it was looking into the case and a police spokesman, when asked about the claims, said: “We’ve received allegations of possible electoral offences in relation to the Ealing Southall by-election. We take it very seriously and appropriate action will be taken.” The spokesman declined to be drawn on who had made the allegations or how the Conservatives had reacted.

The Daily Telegraph diarist Jonathan Isaby, known for his connections with the Conservative party, posted details of the postal ballot on his blog last night. He wrote: “[A] source inside the Tory campaign [in Ealing] reports that it was looking incredibly close, with them calculating the main parties’ tallies as follows: …”

The blog then listed the early results. Soon afterwards, the posting was removed from the website.

Before going on to note that:

By law, political parties are allowed representatives to oversee the validation process, however any release of an indication of how the vote is going is strictly prohibited on the grounds that it could influence subsequent votes. The offence is punishable by up to six months in prison.

However, pick up the print edition of this morning’s Independent and turn to page 10 and you’ll find a article entitled ‘Divided electorate attracts party heavyweights for last ditch appeal’, also bylined as the work of political correspondent, Ben Russell, in which it states the following:

“Postal voting returns presented to Mr Cameron yesterday were said to show Labour with XX percent of the vote … XX per cent for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on XX per cent”

The actual figures given by Russell have, for obvious reasons, been redacted.

As this screen shot from Google’s News Search shows, the article by Russell in which he sites postal ballot figures as having been ‘presented to David Cameron’ was posted to the Indy’s website last night - and the link returned by Google is identical to that of this morning’s story about the Telegraph’s gaff, which shows the the Indy have attempted to cover their tracks by overwriting their original story on the same URL.

There seem to be be possible explanations for Russell’s print edition story. Either these figures were being circulated more widely to and amongst journalists than was first thought, which may hint that there may be some truth to Isaby’s claim to have been given the numbers by a source in the Tory Party, or Russell has lifted the numbers from Isaby’s blog post and filed the first story while unaware of Isaby’s alleged breach of electoral law.

While the Telegraph may be in a position to draw some small crumbs of comfort from their gaff having taken place only on Isaby’s blog, the Indy have gone the whole hog and placed this information into print, which is an altogether more difficult thing to worm your way out of.

UPDATE

There appears to be a discrepancy between the figures cited by Isaby and those given by Russell, so its not at all clear where he sourced his figures from. There was a fair bit of chatter last night on Political Betting and few other sites, with several different sets of figures being floated once posts repeating Isaby’s figures had been removed as news of the police investigation spread.

Okay, time for a bit of analysis and a few thoughts on the Deputy Leadership contest.

I’ve included the round by round results, but done the numbers in more detail, especially in terms of how the redistributed votes split in each round, all of which is laid out in the this Excel file - labour-deputy-leadership.xls

So, without further ado, let’s get on with the results.

Round 1

Blears and the Blairite ‘Ultras’ bomb out in the first round on the back of a paltry 3% in the members’ section (and to think there were concerns expressed before the contest that her being Party Chair might give her an unfair edge) and another last place finish in the Union/Affiliates section, although she does roll in third amongst MPs and MEPs.

Cruddas has come from nowhere, before the campaign kicked off, to top the poll on first preferences (and presumably would have won if the vote had been run under FPTP) on the strength of a clear win in the Union/Affiliate section, beats Johnson in the members’ section and Benn in the MPs & MEPs section.

Harman has polled well amongst members despite a pretty lacklustre campaign, and having come second in the MPs & MEPs section (and overall) looks a stronger contender than she’s been given credit for.

The left/right split in the first round is 53.6% to 46.4% in the left’s favour.

Round 2

Johnson is the main beneficiary of the redistribution of the Blears vote - up 5.5% overall - but the left/right split actually swings further to the left by 4.4% (58% to 42%).

Blears goes out and the overall vote swings left???

Two things appear to have gone on here - Harman has picked up about a quarter of Blears’ vote (and around the same percentage in all three sections), which suggests that that’s Blears’ share of the chromosomal vote moving across to Harman.

Hain and Cruddas have also made marginal gains on this round (about 1%) and as I can’t imagine too many people actually switching from Blears to either its look as if quite a fair number of ‘Blears of nothing’ votes went in - anything up to around 20% would be my guess - making Hains’ and Cruddas’ first round showing look a touch stronger this round.

Benn also does badly out of Blears with a 1.8% pick-up, a third of that of Johnson and behind Harman as well.

Hain goes out.

Round 3

Hilary Benn finishes fourth and goes out, but what happened to the Hain vote?

This round sees a big swing back to the right, which for the first time takes a marginal lead in the overall voting (50.2% - 49.8%). Overall that suggests that Hain’s vote must have broken slightly to the right, rather than staying firmly with the left, which turns out to be backed up by the numbers which show that the Hain vote split fairly evenly across the four candidates, with Harman benefiting most (4.7%), Johnson and Benn picking up about the same (4.2% and 4.1%) and Cruddas losing out slightly (3.5%).

In the three sections, Harman has a slight advantage over Johnson in the pickup from Hain’s Union/Affiliate support, beats him comfortably in the members’ section (coming in only slightly behind Benn) and comes in more or less even with Johnson on picking up votes from Hain in the MPs/MEPs section.

For Cruddas, the redistribution of Hain’s votes is a bit of a disappointment as he comes in behind the other three remaining contenders in both the Union/Affiliates and Members’ sections while gaining a little ground in the MPs/MEPs section.

Throughout the contest it looked very much as if Hain lacked a clearly defined constituency to pitch to, which is evident is how his vote split when redistributed.

Round 4

Now we’ll see where the Benn vote went, and again its fairly even split - Johnson gets 8.4%, Harman 7.6% and Cruddas 6.5%, which puts Cruddas out.

The big news in this round is what happened to Benn’s in the member’s section, which broke a little over 60-40 against Johnson, which suggests that if Benn is to be considered centre-right then he’s only seen as marginally so by members and the Benn name still carries a fair bit of weight in left-wing circles - Hilary’s politics may be rather different from those of his father on many issues, but one has to wonder whether Tony’s reputation for being his own man hasn’t rubbed off on his son, which is why he’s pulled votes in from the left.

Harman picked up the most votes in the member’s section in this round, which swings things back towards the left in a big way, but the 2 to 1 break is a bit misleading on the strength of there being two centre-left candidates to one on the centre-right.

Round 5

And Harman takes it by a very narrow margin, after the Cruddas vote splits evenly in the Union/Affiliate section but breaks in Harman’s favour amongst members (5% - 3.8%) and MPs/MEPs (5.1%-2.5%).

Harman wins by a very narrow margin on the pickup from Cruddas in the members’ and MP/MEPs section. The Union/Affiliates section has little or no impact on the outcome in this round, although it must be disappointment to Johnson because his union background.

Conclusions

Cruddas lost the battle in the end, but as was apparent from Brown’s first speech as leader, won most of the arguments. Housing is right up near the top of the policy agenda and with the Deputy Leadership goes the job of reconnecting with the party’s membership base (and the Party Chairman[person?]ship), which, much to my amusement, means that Brown’s first clear decision as leader ended up sacking Blears by default.

Johnson put up a solid showing and should stay within the upper ministerial echelons on this showing, although he probably not done enough to get one of a big three/four portfolios (Treasury, Foreign Office, Justice/Home Office).

Benn was down for better things before the election on the strength of his performance on International Development and his placing will neither hurt or enhance his chances of promotion in the next Cabinet reshuffle.

As for Harman… who knows quite what to make of her result. She certainly benefited from a solid chromosomal vote - witness the 20-25% of the Blears vote she picked up in the second round - and one has to suspect that she also gained from being the relatively inoffensive middle ground candidate that supporters of Benn, Hain and Cruddas could safely switch to on the anyone but a Blarite tactical vote.

And that leaves Hain and Blears as the losers and the candidates most likely to warming the backbenches come Thursday.

Ministerial chances

Harman: Picked up the Party Chair along with the Deputy Leadership, which makes it clear that she won’t be Deputy Prime Minister. Does she also need a ministerial portfolio to keep her media profile high?

Not a major department certainly, but should pick up the equality portfolio from DCLG, on which she’s a much safer bet than Ruth ‘Opus Dei’ Kelly.

Johnson: One of the policy priority ministries, certainly, but not a move upwards into the great offices of state. May stay at education to finish the job or possibly pick up DCLG to move the local goverment reform agenda.

Benn: Widely viewed amongst the membership as a future Foreign Secretary but is it too soon for him to make the jump? Much depends on where Straw goes and how Brown sees Milliband, but could find himself at the FO if Straw takes the Justice portfolio and Deputy Prime Minister as some expect.

Cruddas: Will he be the new housing minister? Short on ministerial experience, which goes against him, but did very well in connecting with the membership during the campaign, so maybe not housing but a role within DCLG on local government reform and engagement with communities.

Hain/Blears - off the backbenches one suspects, unless Blears’s unswerving support for Blair sees her moved to the Lords in his resignation honours list.

At best, Hain might hang on to the Wales portfolio.

Sectional Results
In the sections, Cruddas topped the poll in the Union/Affiliate section right up until his elimination in the last but one round, and picked up 40% of the votes in that section.

Harman’s big success was in the the Member’s section, beating Johnson by 56.5% to 43.5%, having lead in that section throughout the whole contest, with Benn running second up until his elimination.

Johnson topped the poll amongst MPs/MEPs (53.7%-46.3% in the final round) and, again, led that section throughout the entire contest.

The turnout in each section is reported to be 99% in the MPs/MEPs section, 53% amongst members and a poor 8% in the Union/Affiliates section.

What these results show most clearly is that the days when the members were regarded as a dangerous hotbed of unelectable hard-left activists are long gone - if it can be said that there’s a shift to the left at all, then that shift goes only so far as the Benn/Harman axis, which is about where the Party should be as a credible, mainstream centre-left, social democratic party.

All the Blarite talk of Labour abandoning the political centre-ground and lurching to the left is complete nonsense. There’s a need, and a demand amongst members, for the party to spread a little more to the left in a couple of key policy areas - housing being the obvious one, where the balance between ownership and the social/rental sector needs attention, and the justice/security portfolios need to be rebalanced so that were more visibly seen to be defending our traditional civil liberties in the face of threats to national security and not curtailing them.

Moreover, there is a real need to recast some areas of policy into an authentically Labour narrative. One of things that has clearly been problematic during the Blair years is Blair’s own lack of substantive roots in the party and his poor understanding of the party’s intellectual foundations and history.

Take the NHS and moves towards greater localism (e.g. Foundation hospitals); under Blair this policy was presented as something entirely new and largely without intellectual or political roots within the Labour canon. Nothing could be further from the truth. The tensions between centralism and localism in the NHS (and the debate surrounding the balance between the two) stretch right back to the very foundation of the NHS in thq 1940s and the heated debates of the time between Bevan and Morrison, who favoured a decentralised model that is not that dissimilar from that which the current party leadership have been trying to take forward.

Internally, one of Brown’s big strengths is likely to be his understanding of the party’s roots, history and intellectual traditions, which, if used well, may take some of the sting out of some of the more divisive policy issues of the Blair era. On public sector reform, in particular, we already know that there will be no great substantives change in policy, but what Brown can give the party that Blair couldn’t is a clear sense of how those reforms are actually part of a clearly Labour narrative founded on the long-standing values and intellectual traditions of the party rather than mere pragmatic borrowings from the Tory Party, as too often seemed the case under Blair.

Perhaps the last thing to say here is to address a stream of posts about the Deputy Leadership by Luke Akehurst, who’s about the most openly Blairite Labour blogger out there.

First things first - calm down, Luke, you’ll end up on suicide watch if you’re not careful.

Second, try looking at what actually happened with these election.

1. However you look at it, the old ‘hard-left’ has been almost completely eclipsed. Not only did McDonnell fail to make the leadership ballot but few but his own supporters had any major complaints about it or took the view that the transition between Blair and Brown had been devalued due to the lack of left wing challenge.

2. Cruddas was much the most left-wing candidate in the Deputy Leadership contest and his main platform amounted primarily to one of paying more attention to the one hot issue in many of our heartland constituencies - housing - and a call to reconnect with a membership that, as the results demonstrate, sit somewhere (politically) between Hilary Benn and Harman.

Not much in that, then, to support the idea of the party lurching to the left or red under the bed or whatever it is you’re worried about, just a good strong belief in working from a platform of social justice to build a fair society.

It wasn’t the Amicus/TGWU vote that swung it for Harman - unless you think that somehow being an ex-Postie gave Johnson a divine right to sweep up the union votes when Cruddas was eliminated - it was Harman’s strong performance in the membership section and the 2:1 split in the pickup from Cruddas in the MPs/MEPs section than swung the final vote. All this talk of:

I can’t help thinking that all this stems back to Sir Ken Jackson losing the Amicus General Secretaryship by a couple of hundred votes a few years ago.

At least we know Harriet will follow instructions from Gordon.

Those of us on the right of the party need a serious strategic rethink - the two most left-talking candidates came 1st and 3rd so something was badly wrong with our campaigning or our organisation.

And…

As the gossip from the count is that the union members polled heavily the way they were advised to by their executives the internal party political priority for the long term is to get the unions back to being what they historically have been - the bastion of the right of the party. If we don’t ensure the successors to the current generation of General Secretaries when they retire are from the moderate wing of the party we’ll end up in a decade’s time with Brown’s successor in a contested election being from the left.

…is hardly helpful, in fact it all sound a little reminiscent of the kind of talk that would, during the 80s, have kicked off questions about whether there was a ‘party within a party’ operating - and we know where that led.

Seriously, Luke, if you actually look at where we are today, then its obvious that we’re not going to shift on economic policy, simply keep a steady course. We need to tone things down on justice and security, but that more about quelling some of the ‘not on my watch’ panic around terrorism and telling the Daily Mail/Express to fuck off and stop jumping to their histrionic and sometimes racist bullshit. On Education and the NHS, we need to cut out much of the managerialist waffle and get the narrative right so we take the membership with us on the reform agenda by linking it clearly to substantive Labour values - its then just a matter of delivering. On local government, the new emphasis on housing and localism needs to be welded together into new strand of bottom-up municipalism for the 21st century.

And generally we just need to get on with the job of beating up on the Tories at every possible opportunity.

What there to worry about in any of that?

Unlike some  - and that’s not a set for a dig, Neil - I have to confess that I’m entirely sanguine when it comes to the manner of Gordon Brown’s ascension to the leadership of the party.

Yes, a contested leadership election would have been much more consistent with the party’s democratic traditions, but in the absence of credible challengers from any other wing of the party I really can’t see that John McDonnell’s failure to make the ballot actually makes that much of difference in the grand scheme of things.

Sorry, but in terms of party democracy, there are much more important things to tackle.

We need to rebuild and reinvigorate the grass roots membership of the party, and more importantly, do so in a manner that enables us to construct a meaningful relationship between party members/activists and our elected representatives.

What has done most to damage party democracy during the Blair years is the all too obvious mistrust that the Blairite wing of the party has harboured towards the constituency section and the grassroots membership, which has been perceived throughout as a repository of dangerously off message left-wing ideas.

One only has to look at the position paper put out by Hazel Blears in support of her challenge for the Deputy Leadership to see this in action. She devotes three pages of the document to outlining her views on ‘Building the Labour Party’, which is, itself, rather an odd turn of phrase to use when referring to an 100+ year old organisation, and much of what she has to say concerns itself with the suggestion that CLPs should mutate into community development NGOs and the value she perceives in semi-detached networks such as the Labour Supporter’s Network - one has to wonder quite what the membership figure for LSN are at the moment, I’ve never seen any published.

One of the more telling comments in her paper is this:

Our activities will be transparent – local communities will be encouraged to take part in selecting candidates, in helping with elections, in discussing policy, and in debating with local representatives and ministers.

Okay, so a bit of help on the doorsteps come election time is always welcome and one cannot quibble with consultations on policy and between local communities and elected representatives at any level, but taking part in selecting candidates? Is Hazel suggesting that prospective councillors, MPs and MEPs should take part in US style local primaries as part of our internal selection procedures?

This seems little more than a variation on the same old frustrating theme we’ve heard from the Blairite camp over the last 10 years - the one in which CLPs and activists cannot be trusted to select their own candidates without being watched over by the party machine for fear that we might put forward prospective councillors, and especially MPs who, heaven forbid, might show a disturbing and unwelcome propensity for doing things like ‘thinking for themselves’.

Such concerns might have has some foundations in fact back in 1995/6 but are things still still the same today, but for the odd isolated pockets of what, for want of a better word, one might call the ‘Old Left’ tucked away in a small number of Labour heartland constituencies?

I don’t think it is.

If one looks at the evolution of the Bloggers4Labour network over the last couple of years - and its worth noting that on its own this network is far more extensive that anything the Tories can put up - one has to say that there’s little evidence to gleaned from it to suggest that the grassroots of the party are firmly in the grip of the old-style left wing. Centre-left, certainly, and to some degree to the left of the Blairite wing of the party but by no means to a degree that would advocate or support dragging the party out of the centre-ground towards where a significant part of the labour movement stood during the early 1980s.

Bloggers may not be entirely representative of the grassroots as a whole, but if one looks at the B4L network one finds pretty much all strands of Labour opinion represented amongst its members and, more to the point, one finds finds a clear will to engage seriously in politics and policy to a far more extensive degree that one tends to find in the loose blogging ‘collectives’ associated with other parties.

The shift in emphasis from presentation to policy that’s expects to come with Brown’s ascendancy to the leadership is one that I suspect will suit most Labour bloggers down to the ground - not because we’re all ‘Brownites’ but simply because there is a genuine appetite within the Labour Blogosphere to discuss and debate real politics and the nitty-gritty of policy-making.

Yes, in all probability- well, certainty - the course that the parliamentary party will be charting towards the next general election will already have been set by Brown and his aides/supporters and will start to unfold over the talismanic ‘first hundred days’ as Prime Minister - so, in that sense, the lack of a contest has deprived us of chance to debate policy.

But so what?

Many Labour bloggers have done little else but talk about policy over the last couple of years and what matters in the long run is whether or not any of the debates, discussions and ideas that have been spawned, developed and thoroughly worked over come to work they way into and influence the ongoing development of Labour policy beyond the first raft of Brown-led initiatives.

There may have been little or no scope for party members to try an influence policy at this stage, but that’s not that much of an issue. The transition from Blair to Brown was always going to be a evolutionary rather than revolutionary move with no real prospect of  the party moving significantly to the left - for all the Blairite-wing seem content to hold this up as their favourite bogeyman. What we’ll see from Brown is a continuation of many of the policies that have been developed over the last 10 year - and rather more emphasis on some of the successful economic work that been rather downplayed under Blair. Some of the more idiotic and ill-thought out Blairite ‘initiatives’ - one can barely consider the policies - will fall by the wayside. If nothing else Brown should move quickly to rein in the Home Office and put an end to dumb-ass press release Friday’s by placing a much steadier and more diplomatic hand on the policing and security tiller.

But most importantly of all, irrespective of the detail of policy, what I’m looking for from Brown is something that I think he can deliver that Blair never could due to his lack of real roots in the party, a sense that Labour’s policies in government belong to a distinctively Labour narrative understanding of the world of the kind of progressive society that the party wishes to create and support in future. Blair, whose approach to political theory and philosophy amounted to little more than treating the massed canon of progressive (and sometimes not so progressive) thought as a political pick n’ mix counter to shore up ideas rooted in little else but shiftless tabloid populism, could never deliver such a coherent narrative thread.

Brown, who has real roots in the party and comes from a solid Presbytarian background as influential, in its own way, as Welsh Methodism has been in the development of the Labour movement, should be capable of providing just such a narrative thread and I think it vital that he quickly establishes such a narrative, which will go on to inform and shape future policy development and, to a considerable extent, the kind of input into the policy-making process that might stem from activists.

With that firmly in mind, the absence of a wide-ranging policy debate tied to a Leadership contest is not something I see as a drawback - it may well be beneficial in the long run for the party to have avoided such a debate, which could easily have proved divisive had it taken place without the benefit of understanding the kind of Labour narrative under which that Brown intends to take the party forward.

Getting back to Blears and questions of engagement with the grassroots - and to give her a little credit as well - she does suggest a need to beef up the role National Policy Forum - with the usual unedifying caveats about measuring ‘representation’ in terms of population demographics - which would be a welcome innovation. But again, the emphasis rests firmly on engagement through defined hierarchical structures and in closed and carefully managed environments what to suit, overwhelmingly, the interests of the PLP, rather on direct engagement in the kind of freeform discussions and debates that routinely take place amongst bloggers. Its all very well talking about trying engage the ‘facebook generation’ but to do that effectively politicians have to take a leap of faith and talk to us inhabitants of the electronic frontier on out terms and within our established social mores - which inevitably means facing off with the MSM and fighting back against the established media culture which, for too long, has done little else but prevent politicians engaging in open and constructive debate and promote a dumbed-down political culture obsessed with trivia, personalities and scandal to the exclusion of meaningful public and political discourse.

Blears tops off her position paper with this:

Tomorrow’s Labour Party will be a focussed election-winning machine. But it will also be a sociable, enjoyable, fulfilling place to be for its members. It will reflect the full diversity of our communities. Voluntary activity will be rewarded by personal development as well as communal benefit and social progress. The Labour Party will be a modern party at ease and at home in modern society, and ready for whatever the future may hold.

Enough with the bloody managerialist misson statements already, lets just stick to something along the lines of…

The Labour Party is a progressive, democratic socialist, political party that exists to promote social justice and equality for all.

Simple. To the point. And does what it says on the tin.

David Lammy?

Seems nice enough. Bit nondescript. Has even had his picture taken with Barack Obama…

Has now made a complete arse of himself (via Tom Watson)

Lammy calls for Ethnic Minority Shortlists

In a remarkably frank interview in today’s New Nation newspaper, David Lammy MP (pictured with Barack Obama), Britain’s most senior elected ethnic minority politician, has called on the Labour Party to introduce all ethnic minority short lists for the selection of parliamentary candidates.

Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.

Look, David. This is not difficult - all you need to do is consult a dictionary thus:

Equality (n) : the state or quality of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability.

Tokenism (n): the practice or policy of making no more than a token effort or gesture, as in offering opportunities to minorities equal to those of the majority.

Which leads neatly to the following conclusions…

Equality - all candidates are assessed on merit and selected on ability.

Tokenism - gender/ethnic minority only shortlists

The Culture Minister and MP for Tottenham said, “there should be 18 black MPs, 21 Asian MPs and the rest made up from other ethnic minorities if we were in proportion to our population.

Huh? 18 black MPs, 21 Asian MPs and the rest made up from other ethnic minorities?

No English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish MPs then? Surely not…

And, in any case, what’s all this Asian MPs business?

‘Asians’ are just one big homogeneous mass of humanity, are they? If it’s just 18 Asian MPs you want then 18 ethnic Kazakhs would fit the bill, wouldn’t it.

For fucks sake, David, if you must try an make a diversity-based argument for restricted short-lists, the very least you can try to do is not resort to unrepresentative generalisations like ‘Asian’. ‘South Asian’ would be an improvement as it at least recognises ethnic distinctions between those whose heritage derives from the Indian subcontinent as against, say, ethnic Chinese, who are also ‘Asian’, and so on so forth.

Not much of an improvement, mind, but at least one that shows some recognition of the fact that Asia is fucking big place - get an atlas if you don’t believe me.

We aren’t just politicians. Let’s remember, the House of Commons is a house of representatives.”

Okay, so following that particular piece of asinine logic, how far should we take this idea that parliament should be ‘representative’ of population demographics.

We’re starting here with 646 MPs and a population of 58 million to play with, of which, using the main census classifications and data as our guide…

51% (329 MPs) should be female.

92.1% (595 MPs) should be white - I suppose we should drill down into matters of the proportions of English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, etc. but I can’t be arsed to do the numbers.

Then we’ll take Lammy’s 21 ‘black’ MPs and 18 ‘Asian’ MPs as read, plus we’ll need 6 ‘mixed’ - exactly what the mix should be isn’t specified in the data I’m looking at - a couple of Chinese and a couple of ‘other’. Quite what ‘other’ amounts to isn’t detailed either. Could be fucking Martians for all I know…

Actually, if it is Martians then we’re half way to being covered - step forward Lembit, and I suppose there’s the Vulcan as well.

There’s no census data on sexuality, but as post-Kinsey thinking put general estimates of the gay population at around 3-5%, so we’re looking for 20-32 gay, lesbian and bisexual MPs… do they have to be out or does closeted count as well?

Matters of faith demand that we have 463 Christians, although if we factor in church attendance figures as well then most of them only need go near a church a couple of times a year, and a few could get away with just admitting to watching ‘Songs of Praise’ once in a while. Plus we need 17 Muslims, 6 or 7 Hindus, 4 Sikhs, 3 or 4 Jews, a couple of Buddhists and two ‘others’ - don’t suppose we’ve got much chance a squeezing in a Jedi?

As for the rest, no religion required - although whether that means just atheists or leaves space a few agnostics is anyone’s guess - don’t try asking the agnostics by the way, they’re not sure either. (Boom-boom!)

We’ve also got over 5 million carers - they’ll need 58 MPs - and 194 MPs for all the people who live alone, half of which should be of pensionable age. Mmm… might have to borrow a few from the House of Lords to cover us.

About 10% (65 MPs) should be in poor health - sorry haven’t had time to do the numbers for disabilities in detail, but we’ll definitely need a few members of the ‘wheel and stick’ club, a hearing loop system and Blunkett’s dog will probably get a couple of new friends to play with, which I guess will mean we’ll need a ruling from the Speaker on whether shagging, pissing on the upholstery and sniffing MPs crotches is allowed in the chamber…

…unless the late Alan Clark managed to create a few precedents that I’m not aware of.

And so, and so forth ad nauseum until one reaches the point at which we get to the constituency with the ‘one-legged, Armenian, lesbian with dyslexic child only short-list’.

Parliament in NOT representative of the British population - if it were, a quarter of us would be lawyers and there’d be no one to empty the fucking bins.

MPs are representatives in the sense that - nominally speaking - they are elected to represent the interests of their constituents, who may belong to any of the above mentioned categories and thousands more besides. They represent the people, but are not representative OF the people. If you want a democracy that is actually representative of the people, then you need direct democracy and to be taking all your decisions by public plebiscite.

The Labour Party is presently taking legal advice on the viability of the introduction of hybrid (all women and all ethnic minority men and women) shortlists, but Lammy goes further:

I think the party will have to look in constituencies like my own where 50, sometimes more than 50 per cent of the electorate are from an ethnic minority background.

And if 50% or more of the electorate of a constituency are from an ethnic minority, then where’s the fucking problem in the first place? Give or take the odd bit of fucking around by party HQ, constituencies still select their own candidates/MPs, so you might think that where ethnic minorities are in a majority it would follow that they’d choose an MP whose background is similar to their own.

And against a background that London 2020 is 50 per cent ethnic minority, the party does have to look at all-ethnic minority shortlists where the constituencies are failing to step up to the task.”

So the beef here seems to be about London, where there are ‘too many’ white MPs at present.

First question has to be, why? If the supposition is that an area with a majority ethnic minority population should return an ethnic minority MP, then why isn’t that happening.

It could be that this is simply a function of population mobility - if the sitting MP has been in situ for a while, they may well have been selected at a time when the majority of the local population were white, and things have now changed around them.

In which case, maybe its time for the CLP to consider selecting a new candidate.

It could also be that the membership of the CLP is out of kilter with the make-up of local population - in which case the answer is to go out a recruit some more fucking members from those communities that are under represented.

It could also be that the membership, given the chance of a selection contest, votes down communal lines, splitting the ethnic minority vote and letting the white candidate through - in which case, tough shit, that’s democracy for you, and if you must try and cook the electoral process your best option might well be to introduce the alternative vote system for selection contest. It’s a bit less obvious than cooking the short-lists.

And, of course, all this presupposes that ethnicity is an overriding factor in determining how members vote in selection contests - it couldn’t possibly be the case that, having given the candidates the once over, even the ethnic minority members decide they like the white guy best and vote for him.

If we’re serious about equality - and not just creating the tokenistic appearance of equality - then our starting point has to be to develop a culture in the party in which things like gender, ethnic origin, sexuality, age, etc. are not a factor in influencing the outcome of selection contests.

That’s equality, a political culture in which merit (and politics, of course) determines who gets to stand for election and enter parliament not whether someone possesses the right arrangement of chromosomes, the right amount of melanin or an extensive collection of ornamental dental dams.

It’s that simple - either we are the progressive party we think we are, in which case gender, ethnicity, etc. should not be a factor in determining who we select as candidates - or we’re not the party we like to think we are and need to do something positive about it, which means changing attitudes and not relying on a bit of tokenistic fucking about with short-lists.

Okay, for those following the contest the current official state of play is:

Leader

Brown - 307 nominations

McDonnell - 29 nominations

However the latest reports put McDonnell 15 short of making the ballot paper with only 15 PLP members yet to declare - and one of those is thought to have declared for Brown since the last official update.

All of which means that Brown will become Labour leader (in waiting) at the close of nominations.

Deputy Leadership.

Johnson, Blears, Harman and Hain had made the ballot paper last night, and have now been joined, as expected, by Cruddas.

Benn is still currently shown as 3 short of the required 45 with 35 still to declare - one would think that 3 from 35 or so is not the biggest of asks, so it does appear as if a six-way contest may be on.

What’s most interesting is how the various contenders appear to be shaping up in terms of the kinds of constituencies they’ve been courting or drawing their support from.

Johnson has gone for the union vote, although its thought that he may face stiff competition from Cruddas when to comes to attracting support from Unite (Amicus/TGWU).

Harman has most openly courted the ‘women’s vote’ and drawn support from a number of prominent younger Brownites - quite to what extent this is a reflection of support for a gender-balanced ticket as opposed to a more cynical appreciation of Harman’s values as a non-threatening ‘placemat’ for ambition members of the next generation is unclear as yet.

If Hain has a constituency, then it seems to be Wales, thus far.

Cruddas has a solid raft of bloggers and has gone all out for the activists’ vote.

Blears has hoovered up the Blairites, and…

Benn… there’s a couple of decent polls that seem to show some strong grassroots support but little sense as yet that he has an obvious constituency amongst Labour Members.

Despite some tipping Blears as the dark horse of the race, it may well be that such predictions are premature as Benn’s lack of an obvious constituency could work in his favour under the AV voting system if supporters in the other camps see him as the safe second choice behind their favoured candidate.

Benn sneaking up on the rail to pip the field by a nose? Maybe…

I’m still backing Cruddas mind you, but my instincts are that it would be unwise to write off Benn just yet.

I’ll keep the preamble short and to the point.

Here’s Frank Field trailing a report he’s written for ‘Reform’ which claims that New Deal isn’t working and needs urgent reform…

And what you’ll see below, explains why his report is a load of rubbish that’s based on badly presented and appalling misinterpreted statistics, which - if assessed in their proper context - show that the real position regarding New Deal is precisely the opposite of what he claims and that his proposed reforms would have no impact on recent performance whatsoever, unless it were to make matters worse.

Enjoy.

Ten years ago, Labour was elected on a manifesto pledge to abolish youth unemployment. The New Deal for Young People (NDYP) was designed to ensure that no young person was left to languish on benefit. The report that Patrick White and I have written shows that this, sadly, is far from the truth.In Welfare Isn’t Working, we show that:

• Youth unemployment is higher than when Labour was elected in 1997 (up by 18,000) and higher still since NDYP commenced (up 70,000).

This is a true but far from accurate picture of youth unemployment over the last 10 years because it fails to reference demographic changes in youth (18-24) population over the period.

ONS population data shows that the youth population in 1997 stood at 4.93 million, having fallen over the previous five years - Field starts his time series data in 1992 in the report - from 5.86 million. By way of demographic comparison, the current youth population of the UK is approximately 5.69 million. Youth unemployment has risen over 10 years by 18,000, while the youth population of the UK has increased over that period by around 760,000.

NDYP came on stream in March-May 1998, 12 months after Labour’s election victory in 1997, and as Frank correctly notes, the number of unemployed young people did fall by around 52,000 over the year 1997/8. 1998 is also the year at which the youth population bottomed out at 4,898,000, a fall of 33,700 over the previous year. Over the following three years, youth unemployment continued to fall by a further 60,000, bottoming out at 367,000 in May-July 2001, during which time youth population grew slowly to 5.01 million.

The trend in both youth unemployment and population demographics turned in 2001 and between 2001 and 2007, the number of unemployed young people increased by 140,000 to 507,000, while the youth population grew to 5.69 million, an increase of 680,000.

Looking at the overall time series from 1992 to 2007 cited in the report, youth unemployment as a % of population started out at 12.2% in 1992 (under the Tories), peaked at 13.8% in 1993,and then fell to 9.9% at the time of 1997 general election. From there it fell again to 8.9% by the start of the NDYP and bottomed out at 7.3% in 2001, since when it has risen back to 8.9% in 2007.

From the actual data, once one factors in demographic changes, one learns both that NDYP had its greatest impact in its first three years of operation, when investment in the programme was at highest level, since when it has fallen back to the point (percentage-wise) at which it started as youth population has grown and investment in the programme has been scaled back.

• Not surprisingly, therefore, the pledge to ensure that every young person was either in employment, education or training, has not been fulfilled. Today, there are 1,043,000 “Neets“, a rise of 131,000 since we were elected in 1997, and up 246,000 on the lowest level recorded in the summer of 2001.

Again, if one looks at the time series data and demographic data side by side, the number of ‘Neets’ - ‘chavs’ is more likely to be the colloquial term in most common use these days - follows the same basic pattern as the data for unemployment.

The pivot point at which trends in both data sets turns is 2001 which coincides both with start of a marked upward trend in youth population and with a significant shift in government policy away from tackling youth unemployment to investment in education and health, which followed the 2001 election.

Inactivity rates for 18-24 year olds show a similar trend: up 283,000 on the 1997 level we inherited.

Well yes, Frank. And does this does show the same trend as that for unemployment and ‘neets’? Of course it does - the trends in each of the three data series in question follow the same basic pattern.

Despite the fact that youth unemployment is rising, the proportion of young people on the New Deal is falling. Even so, one in three young people on the New Deal is a retread - they have been there before, some on many occasions. This finding ought not to be surprising. The most sure-fire way of finding work from the New Deal is to take part in the employment option. But the numbers being offered this option have tumbled. The latest figures show that a derisory 2.5% of New Deal participants able to take part in this option.

This is no surprise at all. Not only has investment in NDYP been scaled back over the period from 2001/2 but the contract terms for providers have been tightened considerably over that same period, making participation in the programme much less attractive that it was at the beginning. Moreover, the last 12-18 months have largely been taken up, at the policy level, with plans to redirect and refocus the government’s efforts towards those long-term unemployed on incapacity benefit, shifting the emphasis fuether away from tackling youth unemployment.

Reform is urgent. First, Jobcentre Plus must be involved before young people leave school to try and ensure they have a job lined up at the end of the summer term.

Second, the New Deal needs to begin on day one of unemployment - not six months later.

Third, the New Deal urgently needs decentralising. Each Jobcentre Plus should become autonomous and therefore control its own New Deal programme. The whole emphasis should change from one of ticking boxes (ie, have New Dealers prepare their cv’s, turn up for interviews, etc), to one where local staff are rewarded for landing New Dealers into jobs.

Fourth, as there have been almost 3m new jobs created since 1997, the right of young people to draw benefit beyond a specific time limit should operate in those areas which have shown a consistent increase in the numbers of new jobs.

More of the same will not work.

Field is correct only in his last statement - more of the same will not work.

Everything else, not least his assertion that “reform is urgent” is complete and utter rubbish. In fact the statement that ‘reform is urgent’ makes no grammatical sense whatsoever.

Where shall we start? At the beginning with the suggestion that Jobcentres should be lining young people up for work no soon as they’re out the school gates?

And if getting a job is not in these young people’s future plans?

What if they intend to continue their education? What if they’re not sure exactly what to do and our waiting on their exam results to make a final decision? You know, the results they don’t get until 4-5 weeks after you expect them to join the employment treadmill?

What about New Deal beginning on day one of unemployment… why?

The key data set to understand here is that on page 27 of the report (table 7) which provides time series data for youth unemployment broken down by length of claim (i.e less than 6 months, 6-12 months, 12 months to 2 years and over 2 years).

Again the same observable trends, which follow demographic shifts in population for all but the period from 1998-2001, are evident in this data albeit that they lag behind shifts in population demographics by 12 months - this is function of how the statistics were compiled as the report bases in figures on the period from March to May, before the year’s main ‘intake’ of young people (i.e. school/college leavers) join the workforce (and unemployment register) in September. This intake, therefore, does not come through on the statistics until the following year.

Despite the slight increase in raw figures for youth unemployment over the ten years of this current Labour government, what the data for youth unemployment shows is that in 1997, some 47% of young people were unemployed for at least 6 months, and therefore eligible for assistance from New Deal. This fell to 42% be the start of the New Deal programme in 1998 and continued to fall until 2003, bottoming out at 30%, before rising over the last four years to its current level of 37%. Even allowing for the statistical time-shifting of unemployment trends arising out of the the choice of March-May as the period for which statistics are cited by field, youth unemployment continued to fall for a full 2 years after the populations demographics began to turn significantly upwards, i.e. one full year longer that would be expected simply from the correlation between population demographics and youth unemployment.

This does indicate that New Deal did have a marked effect over the period from 1998-2001/2 and into 2002/3 - which is what one would expect given that changes in policy after the 2001 election would take 12 months to filter through into the system and a further 12 month to impact on statistical trends.

The statistical picture that emerges when one looks at long-term (12 months +) youth unemployment is even more interesting. This started out at around 38% in 1992, peaked in 1994 at 52% and fell back to 37% at the time Labour came to power in 1997. This fell by a further 6% over 1997/8, before New Deal, to 31% and then by a further 17% over the period from 1998 to 2002 to a mere 14%, before creeping back up to its current level of 23%.

Over the full life of the New Deal programme, the youth population of the UK has grown by 15%, while the number of young people who are unemployed for more than 12 months has fallen, as a percentage of total youth unemployment, from 27 to 23% and for those unemployed for more than six months from 32% to 27%. Moreover, at then end of the main period of investment in New Deal, in 2001/2, long term youth unemployment (1 year +) amounted to a mere 14% of youth unemployment as a whole, while the figure for those unemployed for 6 months + sat at 32% (and fell even further to 30% in the following year).

And New Deal had no impact at all?

Leading on from this, Frank’s third point is a complete nonsense.

One would presume, to begin with, that Frank’s use the terms ‘decentralising’ and ‘autonomous’ in this context (Jobcentre Plus) indicate that both have, or are about to become, political euphemisms for privatisation. Now, whether there may or may not be some merit in that is outside the scope of this article, but what is most germane is what Field’s data actually says about the performance of the New Deal Programme in the context of both demographic shifts in population and the manner in which programme delivery and contract payments have altered within New Deal over time.

As noted previously, the demographics for the youth population of the UK bottomed out in 1998 and rose only marginally between 1998 and 2001.

By comparison, the main trends in the fall in youth unemployment from it 1992/3 peak moved in concert with the population demographics until 1998, at which point the main statistical trends in youth unemployment continue to fall past the point at which the population stabilised, only beginning to rise again in 2001, at the same time that the youth population also began to rise dramatically - and in the case of the percentage of young people out of work for 6 months+, the trend actually continued downwards for a full two years after other trends bottomed out and turn upwards.

When one factors in demographic data, what one finds is that New Deal did have a measurable effect on youth unemployment, most significantly over the three years from 1998 to 2001 but with some lingering effects on medium-long terms rates (6 months +) in evidence for a further two years after other trends had turned to follow the population demographics.

This neatly coincides with the period (1998-2001) during which the government made its greatest investment in New Deal, in terms of both policy emphasis and financial resources - tackling youth unemployment was a key theme of Labour’s first term but was given far less emphasis from its second term (2001) onwards, with the focus shifting to investment in education and health before being somewhat overtaken by the invasion of Iraq. Whether Britain received an adequate economic return on its investment in tackling youth unemployment via NYDP is another matter entirely, one that Field conspicuously fails to address or even question is his report.

To make matters more interesting, the period in which NDYP was working was also the period in which the programme was least driven by defined targets and job outcomes and, contractually, recognised and rewarded providers for delivering ancillary outputs, such as basic skills development and providing young people in the programme with an element of what might be termed ‘pastoral care’. The focus of the programme, amongst many of the better providers at the time, was not only on getting young people into employment, but also on providing them with the basic skills, social skills and confidence to make their employment opportunities stick and, where possible, start to build careers.

NDYP has clearly, from the statistics, declined in its effectiveness since 2001, and particularly since 2003 in terms of its impact on medium-long term unemployment amongst young people. And this does coincide with a reduction in the financial resources allocated to the programme, with which came a significant shift in emphasis away from ‘pastoral’ support towards a target-driven culture in which the job outcome isnot only ‘king’ but, following the most recent round of contract changes, has now become the sole basis on which programme providers are paid.

Interesting, eh? The more that NDYP has moved towards Frank’s preferred ‘incentive model’ - payment by job outcome - the less effective the overall programme has become.

Moreover, and this something else that Frank neglects to mention, the shift in contracts towards, and then fully to payment by job outcome alone, has also had the effect of driving many of the local New Deal providers, who were involved in the programme at the outset, out of the programme altogether, particular in relation to the New Deal Voluntary Sector Option (NDVSO does what it says ‘on the tin’ - provides work experience placements and support though VSOs and local charities to help young people in to work).

As a result, delivery of NDYP has become much less local over time, in no small measure due to the very contract/incentive culture that Field is trying to champion, which has driven small local providers out of the market in favour large national organisations like A4E, which have hoovered up millions of pounds in local contracts over the last few years in areas where the local providers have walked away from the programme because it was no longer financially viable for them to continue to deliver it.

(Some might take the view that that’s business and ‘them’s the breaks’ - without going in to the full ins and outs of, especially, local voluntary sector funding regimes, that’s not strictly the case here. Trust me, it’s a little more complicated that it might first appear as the product of a distinctly uneven set of playing fields.)

According to Field, ‘more of the same will not work’ - and I agree, which is why I find his proposals laughable.

What Field proposes in no more than the same target/incentive based contract culture and outcome-driven methodology that been developing since 2002/3 and which came fully in to place at the last New Deal contract round in 2005 - and as Frank’s own statistics show, this purely incentive driven model, which rewards only job outcomes, isn’t working anything like as effectively as the more flexible and more pastorally orientated, New Deal programme that ran from 1998 to 2001/2.

Shifting the contractual basis of New Deal delivery to a purely outcome driven system has changed the overall ethos of New Deal from one in which a significant emphasis was placed on preparing and supporting young people into employment in addition to find them a job to one that emphasises driving them in to jobs as quickly as possible and with the minimum of preparation and support to the exclusion of all other considerations, and the statistics show that its the former approach that worked most effectively.

New Deal had the greatest impact - and bucked the trend in terms of the correlation between population demographics and youth unemployment - during the period from 1998 to 2001/2, when the ethos of preparing young people for, and supporting them into employment, held sway, and reverted back to the general track of population from 2002 onwards, the period in which New Deal contracts became much more target driven and moved towards, and then on to, payment solely by job outcome.

The very system that Field advocates, under which New Deal is driven purely by financial incentives attached solely to job outcomes, is the delivery model that has failed over the last five where, previously, New Deal was a qualified success in the sense that it did reduce youth level of youth unemployment below the prevailing trends set by population demographics - exactly how much of a success it was during this period (or even whether it was a success at all) depends not just on it statistical impact on unemployment level but whether the economic benefits of the programme exceeded the cost of delivery and, if so, by how much.

Field, as you might expect, make no effort to even consider, let alone assess this last characteristic of the New Deal programme.

Ultimately, the most telling statistics in the report - other than the data on the levels of medium-long term unemployment - are to be found on its final page, which gives time series data for the youth population classified as ‘economically active’. ‘Economically Active’ is defined by the ONS as follows:

A person is economically active if they are either employed or unemployed in a particular period - usually the survey reference week. Economically active people supply, or want to supply, their labour to produce goods and services within the production boundary, defined by the UN System of National Accounts. Therefore, economic activity is on the supply side of the labour market framework. Some countries refer to ‘participation’ to mean precisely the same as economic activity.

And conversely…

The economically inactive are those people who are not in employment, but do not fulfil all the criteria to be classified as unemployed.

The number of economically active young people peaked at 77.6% in 1992-3, under the Tories, at the same time that youth unemployment was its highest level in the time series, and has fallen fairly consistently since, bottoming out in 2003 at 74% before picking up slightly to where it sits now at 74.4%.

Field cites this as evidence for the failure of the New Deal programme, and yet offers no data to explain either the fall in levels of economic activity or its causes, indeed in noting that ‘the proportion of young people has fallen as a proportion of the numbers claiming benefit’ borders on the incoherent. Fewer young people on NDYP should push up the figure for economic activity as if they’re not on the programme, they should be classed as unemployed and, therefore, economically active according to the ONS definition - participation in a New Deal programme removes one from the unemployment register and, therefore, from the statistics on economic activity.

What these statistics do show is that amongst young people there is a fairly intractable number, amounting to around 25% of the youth population who are likely to economically inactive at any given time, a figure that will include students in full time education, women with children who do not, presently, work and who are are not currently required to actively seek employment, irrespective of whether they are in receipt of welfare benefits or not, young offenders on remand or serving prison sentences, young people with disabilities and long-term limiting illnesses or who act as carers for parents and relatives with disabilities and, of course, those who cannot find employment, often due to poor basic skills, or simply will not find employment unless more or less coerced into it.

Field makes no effort at all to account for this trend nor to explain it other than in terms of his assertion that New Deal is not working and, in terms of his proposed remedies, appears to believe that the best way to attack this issue is through more incentive driven coercion of the kind that the rest of his data shows to have been ineffective.

The slow but steady fall in the number of economically active young people over the last 15 years suggests that the underlying issues are actually structural and, therefore, largely intractable to the manipulation of employment policy, no matter what incentives one throws at Jobcentres.

A proportion of young people will always be economically inactive no matter what, these being those who stay on in full-time education. The same will be true for young offenders - they will always be a proportion of young people on remand or in prison at any given time. Adjustments in some areas of social policy may have some small impact on this downward trend, increased access to affordable childcare could release more young women into the labour market, as could a fall in the number of young women with children - the latter is, of course, a matter in which employment policy will have little or no impact at all. There may also be some scope for policy initiative to tackle the number of young people who are economically inactive due to disability, long-term limiting illness or because they act as carers - although the extent to which the costs of such policies might be justified in terms of the economic benefits that might accrue from them is a much more difficult matter to assess.

In the case of all those listed above, Fields final proposed remedy - restricting access to welfare benefits in areas where there are limited employment opportunities and limited scope/activity in terms of job creation - is a complete waste of time. Those in full-time education have no need to relocate to find work, and may do so anyway on joining the workforce at the conclusion of their time at college/university. Those with young child, disabilities or caring responsibilities lack even the most basic degree of economic and social mobility necessary to ‘get on their bike’ Tebbit-style.

What is left is a rump of the indigent and often unemployable, whom Field suggests should be forced into becoming what amounts to an itinerant, rootless, labour pool to be driven around the country according to local demand for labour, with all the attendant social consequences that would arise from such a policy.

The trite, right-wing response to this is that of Norman Tebbit, which I’ve already mentioned. Get on your bike and look for work.

In simple economic terms that may seem persuasive, but it complete ignores the social consequence that such a policy would engender - the net social impact of the forced creation an itinerant indigenous pool of labour, driven to relocate en masse by market forces and labour demand would have no less an impact - in terms of social pressures and demand pressures for services, housing, etc. - on those areas into which these young people were driven by the need to seek employment than would a similar influx of labour from Poland or any of the other EU accession state - in fact the impact would be somewhat greater given that, as UK citizens, their entitlement to access services and welfare benefits is considerable greater than than of economic migrants from other countries.

What Field seems to have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, is that with the right kind of incentives in place, labour market ‘mobility’ can be made to cut both ways - rather than forcing the labour pool to relocate to secure employment, the existence of a suitable labour pool in a particular area can serve as an incentive for businesses to relocate to where the workforce is to take advantage of its availability, especially if the right kind of economic inducements for business are on offer.

Ultimately, if one puts to one side the question of those who are simply indigent by choice and preference, the majority of those within this rump of surplus labour will be there by ‘virtue’ of the lack of bankable skills and experience - and more often than not, those skills they lack are likely to be of the most basic variety, literacy and numeracy in particular. These people are, again, the ‘victims’ of structural changes in the UK labour market over which they have no control whatsoever; many, if not most, are those who have little to offer but a strong back and a (hopefully) willingness to work hard in return for a fair reward. They are those who would once have been absorbed into the workforce through the unskilled/semi-skilled jobs provided by Britain’s manufacturing industry, of which very little exists when compared to the last significant period of full employment, which came once Britain had rebuilt following the Second World War.

To some extent one can attempt to address some of the structural issues this raises by way of investment in education - a better educated workforce is better able to take up opportunities for employment in a labour market where the key demands are for skills and knowledge rather than hard graft and muscle. However, the mere fact that we are dealing with human beings of vastly differing talents and capabilities suggests that education alone will not be sufficient to take up the slack in the workforce. There will always be a segment of the population for whom a strong back is all they have of value to offer to employer, and the one question that neither Field, not those like him who advocate exclusive market-driven solutions, seems willing or able to address is the question of whether, in an era dominated by globalisation, the market, acting alone, really can provide sufficient employment for this segment of the population, not just in the UK but across the ‘developed’ world as a whole.

Personally, I would suspect not, being influenced in my thinking to a considerable extent by the knowledge that even the most vocal of proponents of globalisation - the US - are still wont to lapse in open and obvious protectionism when it suits there domestic interests and serves to shore up their internal labour markets.

Field’s analysis of New Deal is little short of rubbish. His statistical data is presented entirely without reference to population demographics over the period, without which the context in which New Deal has operated and it actual performance over time cannot be adequately assess.

In short Field has chosen his evidence to fit the argument he wished to advance, rather than founded his arguments on the evidence, and, when viewed in their full context, nothing in the evidence he does provide supports his prescription for reform which, if adopted, would amount to nothing more than throwing good money after bad.

As to why Field would produce such a poorly crafted and conceived report at this time, the answer to that seems all to apparent in this single statement, which appears in both the executive summary of the report and its body content:

The New Deal programme is very much the Chancellor’s brain child. Gordon Brown’s laudable ambition has been to make life on benefit thing of the past.

No vendetta like an old vendetta, eh?

Interestingly, one of the comments under his article on CiF suggests that in the event of the Conservative victory at the next election, Field should be offered the opportunity to cross the floor and work on the development of Tory policy.

Tell you what - why wait? If the Tory Party is so enamoured of Field, then they can have him now, the sooner the better in fact.

Following on from Mr Eugenides’s “Reasons not to vote for Harriet Harman #12“:

Any Labour supporters who have stumbled upon this blog [by mistake, one presumes] might want to read the series of questionnaires which the Guardian put to the candidates for the deputy leadership of the party before casting your ballot.

The last question put to the six candidates, just as a bit of fun, was “Who is the best James Bond?”. Now, obviously I don’t have a vote - and just as well - but if I did, I’d go for one of the five of them who succeeded in answering the question without making me want to stave their faces in with a mallet.

Hilary Benn
Sean Connery is James Bond, but Timothy Dalton was pretty good too.

Hazel Blears
Daniel Craig.

Jon Cruddas
Sean Connery. Even if his political preferences are not to my taste, his acting is.

Peter Hain
I think Daniel Craig is a fantastic Bond, and a much grittier and more realistic figure for the current age than the suave country gents who preceded him.

Harriet Harman
None of them. It’s time to let Miss Moneypenny drive the cars!

Alan Johnson
Sean Connery, despite his politics.

I’d like to commend Jackie Ashley for providing reason #13:

The last thing Labour needs

Is Alan Johnson really proud to claim endorsement from John Prescott? If so it’s a flawed judgment - and it won’t win back the female vote.

Huh? WTF is she on about?

The name of the game at this stage is to get your 45 MPs so that you get on the ballot paper - courting the ‘female vote’ comes later.

It’s not often that a Guardian headline makes me do not just a double take, but a triple take. But yes, there it is today: Key backing for Johnson in Labour deputy fight. Who is this key backer? None other than the current deputy prime minister John Prescott. Well, either memories are extremely short or Alan Johnson’s political judgment is deeply flawed.

Is it? Prescott for all his manifest faults, is the outgoing Deputy Leader and Deputy PM, so his backing must surely count for something. It is, after all, a matter of the guy currently doing the job indicating that he thinks that a particular candidate has the ‘right stuff’ to do the same job.

Let’s look first at Labour’s problem. Dire local and Scottish election results combined with poor polling reveal one very clear trend: that women, particularly older women, are deserting Labour. Part of David Cameron’s success has been that he has succeeded in portraying himself as a parent, a man who cares about the happiness agenda and the environment as well as the economy and defence.

Oh for fucks sake - women of the world unite, you have nothing to lose by voting for the toff, just because he seems a very nice man, than your dignity, self-esteem and any semblance of possessing the capacity to take politics seriously.

So it seems obvious that the last thing the Labour party needs is a blokeish deputy leader who is proud to claim endorsement from the party’s original male chauvinist pig. John Prescott, remember, is the man who just a short while ago was all over the newspapers with his secretary’s legs round his neck. His view of women is that they are most useful when on their knees under a desk, “servicing” an important man who can barely be bothered to look up from his papers. John Prescott is worse than a joke, he’s a disgrace, and why Alan Johnson wants to boast that he is the natural successor to Prescott mystifies me.

Let me take a guess here. Prescott is the current Deputy Leader and Deputy PM and Johnson wants to be the next Deputy Leader and Deputy PM, which is where the whole ‘natural successor; part comes in.

Unless Jackie’s seen the Deputy’s job description and it specifically includes ’shagging the secretary’ as one of duties of the post-holder, then Prescott’s personal shortcomings have precisely fuck all to do with the matter of whether Johnson can or cannot legitimately be seen to be Prescott’s natural successor.

If Labour is to mean what it says about listening to the public, and wanting to be more in touch with peoples’ lives, it goes without saying that the party needs a woman right up there at the top. The obvious candidate is Harriet Harman, who has been pushing the work-life balance agenda for years. She’s unpopular with some of her male colleagues at Westminster because, when her children were growing up, she eschewed the Commons bar to go home and see her kids. Given the constant contact children bring with schools, doctors and hospitals I suspect her decision gave her far greater insights into the problems facing public services than had she stayed drinking at Westminster.

Oh fuck off - Harriet’s unpopular with some of her male colleagues because she didn’t go drinking with the lads? What kind of half-arsed bullshit is this?

If this is the kind of fifth rate crap that Harman’s supporters are running with now, just what the fuck will they be saying if she loses..?

Ah well. We all know why Harriet lost the contest. It’s because she never could quite manage to beat John Reid and Chatshow Charlie in the member’s Christmas chug-a-lug contest and her decision to spit instead of swallow made a hell of mess of the upholstery in the Members’ Bar and seriously pissed of the Serjeant-at-Arms.

Fuck right off, Jackie. not even Iain Dale would be dumb enough to try a piss poor smear this fucking blatant… although I’d still only give you evens on Staines trying it.

It’s significant that most of the younger Brownites - Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander, Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls - are backing Harman. That’s not because she’s one of their tight inner circle - she’s not. But these younger politicians, who don’t want to see their key years spent in opposition, recognise the new agenda that is needed. If the party wants to win back women voters, it needs to realise that John Prescott was far from a political asset, he was a political disaster.

Well yes it is significant that many of the younger Brownites are backing Harriet - although I don’t recall Ed Balls being on the list of backers… in fact a quick check shows his name to be conspicuous by its absence at the moment.

The significance of this simply that Harriet is a one shot deal as a potential deputy - she’s not and never will be a serious contender for leader, if and when Brown steps down, nor is her tenure as deputy - if she did get it - likely to last beyond Gordon’s time as leader.

In short, for the younger generation she’s a pretty good placemat, ideal for holding down the job until they’re ready to step up on the day that Gordon passes on the torch, without there ever being a threat that she’ll hang around longer than is required or get in the way of the next generation’s ambitions.

Okay, I suppose it time I had my say on the Deputy Leadership contest and, in keeping with other bloggers, make it known where I stand on the candidates.

I should say, right from the off, that my general take on the position has been all along that a new Deputy should attend cabinet but need not, necessarily, become Deputy Prime Minister, a role that I see as an unnecessary appendage with no real constitutional status, so what I’ve been look for most has been a sense that a candidate has a clear view on what the role should be, from a party standpoint, and how they’ll go about undertaking that role.

That alone ruled out both Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn, both of whom has said little more than that they’ll do whatever job Gordon asks them to do. Sorry guys, I did want a bit more than that, and in case, Benn in particular should conserve his time and energies for the senior cabinet position I hope he’ll be getting. He’s done a good job at International Development and looks a potential Foreign Secretary, the one cabinet role that definitely could not be combined with the Deputy Leadership of the Party.

Peter Hain? No, sorry, just not for me - one of those visceral things, I’m afraid. Can’t really explain it, it just feels wrong.

Harriet Harman? I do like Harriet, but the ‘I’m the women’s candidate’ shtick was a complete non-starter and, well, horribly outdated. I’d have actually taken here more seriously as a contender without it, because just as an individual she has some merits.

Hazel Blears? What do you think?

A position paper full of the same old managerialist bullshit I’ve been raging at for the last couple of years and a list of supporters - John Reid, John Hutton, Ruth Kelly, Joan Ryan, Andy Burnham - that reads more like an announcement that she’s contracted Death Watch Beetle and Dutch Elm Disease.

And that means… yes, this ascerbic and occasionally potty-mouthed blogger is declaring for Jon Cruddas, who’s been consistently impressive throughout and has a clear sense of the job he wants to do as Deputy Leader. I’ll no doubt have more to say on Jon as the campaign develops - and out of deference to B4L, play fair and don’t recommend this post because I’m backing Jon, I doubt I have that much sway amongst other bloggers so don’t make more of deal out this than it is.

On to other matters, and far be it from me to offer suggestions for the next Labour cabinet but I do have a few thoughts.

Benn at the Foriegn Office would do me nicely.

Jack Straw is rumoured to fancy a crack at the Treasury, and why not - he has had a run at both the other great offices, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary - but for me I’d prefer to see him make a return to the Home Office, where we need a safe and considerably more diplomatic hand at the tiller than we’ve had for quite a long time. It’s long past time we had someone in there who, when Paul Dacre says jump, responds with ‘go jump yourself’.

Treasury? After 10 years there, Gordon knows better than anyone what the job needs, so I’m happy to take his judgment on it. Let’s face it, it hardly as if the Tories have much of challenger in Osborne anyway.

Johnson’s doing okay at education - I was a bit miffed with the climb down on Catholic schools but he’s been pretty steady in the role and deserves more time to carry it forward.

Health is major priority - we need someone in there who can talk and listen to doctors and nurses not lecture them in the fine arts of managerialist bullshit, and we need a coherent narrative for where we’re going with the NHS. Harriet Harman might be a good choice here as she’d bring a somewhat more human touch to the role, but with some serious backup for sorting out the structural problems… Liam Byrne springs to mind as he’s frighteningly intelligent and seems adept at cutting to the root of problems pretty quickly, and he’s one of the few ministers who understand IT well enough to pull some of the recent technology cock-ups out of the mire.

The new Justice ministry needs to come over to the Commons for the sake of accountability and Mike O’Brien’s been solid in the role of Solicitor General, so could step up.

As for the Attorney General, we need to do something radical in the face of the extent to which Goldsmith has been compromised over the advice on Iraq.

One approach could be to split the Attorney General’s role in two and hive off his prosecutorial responsibilities to an independent barrister under the aegis of the Supreme Court, leaving the AG roles as the government’s legal advisor intact.

The other would be to appoint someone noted for their independence of mind and attitude. Baroness Helena Kennedy is one possibility, the other would be - and this is radical - Michael Mansfield QC, although whether we could afford his services is another matter.

You might guess from this that other than the NHS, my main personal priority is to get out approach right on justice and civil liberties - we’ve moved too far to the right here, so far that the Tories can talk tough and still appear less authoritarian than we are. That has to change.

That’s as much as I want to say for now - more thinking aloud than anything else - except for one thing.

Renewal.

Is anyone sure exactly what it means?

For a long time it looked like all it was was a coded reference to Gordon’s eventual ascension to the leadership.

More recently its become tied in with the parlous state of our membership and local structures.

What it means to me - and what I want to see it come to mean for the Labour movement - is the rediscovery and reinvention of the intellectual foundations of the Party and the Labour Movement.

Nye Bevan once observed:

The Tories, every election, must have a bogeyman. If you haven’t got a programme, a bogeyman will do.

We’ve spent too much time on bogeymen in recent years and need to get back to having a programme, one with real intellectual foundations.

As a party and a movement we have a broad canon of radical though to draw upon, which we need to revisit, reassess and perhaps reinvent for the 21st century. Our starting point must be to exclude nothing. And yes, that does mean Marx as well…

Old style state socialism may be rather a busted flush, but much of Marx’s economic work holds valid, especially his work on the structural instabilities of capitalism which even right-wing economist accept, much as they disagree with his prescribed solutions - one might say that he was a far better diagnostician than a doctor.

Orwell argued on many occasions - never more so than in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ - for the necessity of developing an ‘English Socialism’ - or rather a British Socialism as it would be these days, something that would be distinct from the state socialism of the Soviet Union. His vision of what that might look like was sketchy and, from today’s perspective looks very dated indeed, but the basic idea - that by drawing on the many different strands of radical thought, we may be able to define a form of socialist philosophy tailored to the unique characteristics of Britain and the British people, is one I think remains valid today.

What shape this might take and how it might look is not something on which I have clear thoughts at the moment, just the general thought that somewhere in there will turn up Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s weaknesses, a fair chunk of Mill, Isaiah Berlins’ thoughts on the nature of liberty - that’s a must - and a whole raft of other things beside.

The older I get the more I learn one thing for certain - no single philosopher or political theorist has all the answers but in many they are ideas and partial solutions to problems that, if approached with an open mind and a willingness to think creatively, may provide ideas for the way forward.

That’s what I’m looking for from this idea of renewal - a real sense that what it means is an desire for and effort to rebuild the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the Labour movement.

What politics has lost over the last 30-40 years, and which accounts for some of the current problems we face due to disengagement from the political process - is the sense that it provides people with something to believe in - a narrative understanding of society and the world around them.

It’s that we need to rediscover. A sense of purpose.

While writing the rest of this post, ongoing inquiries led me to the actual web development company behind the Brown Campaign website - Isotoma, which is based in York, and to this blog entry…

New customer site goes live

We’ve been beavering away pretty hard for the last few weeks on a new site which went live today. Gordon Brown’s campaign web site. One of the most topical sites we’ve ever launched (and linked to from BBC News, too, which always makes for interesting server administration panics). Given the inherently short time scales the team here have really pulled out all the stops to get it live, and even if we say so ourselves we think it’s all looking rather nice…

As this URL shows, the site is also hosted by Isotoma on their own servers.

http://firth.fe.isotoma.com/

With that, I’ll let most of the rest of the story ride….

UPDATE - The site does, of course, indicate on its front page that its hosted by Isotoma, which makes what follows all the more amusing for it having been staring both Dizzy and Staines in the face all day.

….

Time to revisit a post from last month which picked up on Iain Dale’s coverage of Dizzy’s investigations into the existence and likely whereabouts of Gordon Brown’s leadership campaign website.

Time for a quick synopsis of past events…

1. The Times ran a distinctly sub-standard article which alluded to the Brown campaign attempting to conceal campaign donations from the Electoral Commission, all of which was in keeping with the rather obvious and continuing Tory strategy of trying to mire Brown in allegations of low-level sleaze.

2. Dizzy did a little digging and turned up a number of suspicious looking domains in the form ‘gordonbrown4leader.[TLD]’ registered by an employee of Silverfish, a media communications company that has previously carried out media work for the Labour Party.

3. Dizzy then wrote up a somewhat ambiguous piece about his findings that, perhaps unintentionally, conflated his discoveries with the Times story, which he used as a starting point for his piece.

4. Iain Dale then jumped on Dizzy’s bandwagon and added a bit of spin of his own to the story to push it even further down the line that had appeared in the Times.

I then pitched in on the premise that the evidence, as presented, looked rather too thin to justify even Dizzy’s at times heavily qualified contentions, let alone Dale’s additional spin or the content of the Times article.

As should be obvious, with the launch of the Brown campaign comes the Brown campaign website, which means we’re now in a position to judge fully who got what right (and wrong).

So, first off, a minor mea culpa on my part - I did state in my original piece that:

Dizzy’s got it completely wrong having made the classic blogger’s error of interpreting the ‘evidence’ to fit a pre-conceived conclusion rather than deriving conclusions from the evidence.

And I now seems that I need to revise my original estimate somewhat.

What Dizzy got right was that Silverfish have registered domains that are no being used by the Brown campaign - although what he hit on in terms of the domains he uncovered at the time appears to have been no more than ‘possibles’ that have now been rejected or protective registrations. The ‘gordonbrown4leader…’ domains continue, at this point, to be parked up at Discount Domains.

What is in use - and was also registered by Silverfish at the same time - was gordonbrown.org and gordonbrownforbritain.com (plus .co.uk, .org and .org.uk), which are the domains in use.

As for everything else… that’s all still complete guesswork and conjecture.

Whatever else Silverfish are, they’re not a web design company and nothing on their new site - and I particularly like the game of ‘guess how to scroll the page’ - suggests that they have anyone on staff with the kind of in-house expertise to deliver the all singing and dancing new media web 2.0 love-in that Dizzy was expecting. Oh, and they have made just as poor a job of protecting the domains they are using as those that Dizzy found as well.

So, with hindsight, Dizzy’s exclusive looks little better today than it did at the time, inasmuch as the only solid thing he’s proved is that a company bought a couple of hundred quid’s worth of domains last October.

Interesting, but small potatoes and still no where close to supporting the sleaze line that Dale and The Times were trying to run with.

As for the rest - the web 2.0 love-in and the ‘backend in development since October/December’ well…

I supposed you can call the site ‘web 2.0′ in the sense that it has RSS feeds and a video on it…

… it’s a Wordpress blog (version 2.13) and the video is hosted on YouTube, in an account created on May 8th, with the footage in the video having been shot in Sheffield on May 1st. The Moblog/Photo Gallery uses a bog-standard Wordpress plug-in and a Flickr account, and the ‘Follow’ option takes you to an embedded Google Map (another standard plug-in), which provides the site with a very neat way of spiking Paul Staines’s ‘Where Gordon’ shtick…

Staines is already whinging about the ‘unoriginality’ of the Google Map in a post that claims, in addition that ‘Gordon’s People’ denied and lied about the site and Dizzy seems to think that the appearance of Brown’s campaign site at a domain bought by Silverfish vindicates his original article in full. He’s also still twittering on about ICANNs policy on domain speculation despite knowing full well that the policy is entirely meaningless and unenforceable - or does Dizzy think that GoDaddy’s Domain Name Auction Site vets every single seller for complience with ICANN policy before letting them put a domain up for sale.

What was said by Mark Lucas from Silverfish on April 12th - the day after Dizzy’s first article - was…

“There is a mini-industry around buying domain names. We look into the future and work out what is likely to be useful. We were not commissioned by anyone, but we’d be happy to sell it on to Gordon Brown.

“We do a lot of stuff for the Labour Party, but haven’t been asked to do anything for Mr Brown’s campaign. We have been filming for Labour in the local elections, including Cabinet ministers for films, web clips and archives.”

In light of the fresh information to hand, I am have to revise my estimate of the story - Dizzy was not ‘completely wrong’ - only 99% or so has turned out to be bollocks.

In short, Dizzy’s still proved nothing of substance - and even if it is true that Silverfish were given a nod from Damien McBride to register a few domains, as Staines contends well so fucking what - its hardly a smoking gun in fact it doesn’t even amount to nicking paperclips, which is about the level of Staines most recent revelations.About the most interesting thing here, all told, is that Staines has been up to his usual trick of making stealth edits - his post of yesterday originally cited the url of Brown’s campaign website as www.gordonbrown.org and not www.gordonbrownforbritain.com, only for Dizzy to drop him in it this time by acknowledging this at 10am today, which neatly puts a timeline on the alteration made by Staines.

What makes this even more stupid is that the gordonbrown.org domain actually does now redirect to the campaign website.

You following this?

Staines has accused the Brown campaign of lying about its relationship with Silverfish having dishonestly made an alteration to a post published yesterday to make it appear that he knew the correct domain name of the Brown campaign website a full day before he actually got that information. Any one with a shred of honesty would simply have noted that the domain identified yesterday, the .org, now pointed to the actual domain of the website, but not Staines because that wouldn’t fit in with his carefully cultivated image of being ahead of the game.

And now, as you’ll have seen from the exclusive at the top of the post, Silverfish do not own the Brown campaign website nor do they appear to have had any substantive part in its development, but for possibly the first campaign video.Will Staines now post a correction? Or will he try another stealth edit to cover his mistake?

UPDATE

Even more bizarrely, Staines, post this morning actually credits Dizzy for making the spot on the real URL, which makes it even more odd that he’d then go back and alter a day old post without noting the change…

One starts to wonder quite what time Staines started on his usual Friday lunch today?

UPDATE - STAINES BUSTED AGAIN…

Staines has been stealth editing again…

“The shiny all new GordonBrown.org…”?

That wasn’t there earlier - and conveniently enough the date stamp on the RSS Feed shows the time that this post was lasted edited - 16:33 on Friday 11th May.

T0 make matters even more interesting, Staines has now added a footnote to his story…

*There are a few others [domains] as well. Silverfish bought some of them off lucky owners for substantial sums.

Funny he should mention that because the previous owner of www.gordonbrown.org turns out to have one David Taylor, who was found last year to have registered a spate of ‘Johnson4Leader’ domains (and, ironically, was also busted by Dizzy) - the domain appears to have housed the hastily pulled ‘Gordon is a moron’ blog.

And as Tim Ireland relates here (scroll down to point 11) Taylor has also been identified by Paul Staines as one of his past (and maybe present, who knows) sources as this e-mail exchange demonstrates…

—- Original Message —–

From: “Guy Fawkes”

To: “Tim Ireland” tim@bloggerheads.com

Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 4:31 PM

Subject: Re: boom

>

> Have you done fourth term net?
>
> Are you going to point the finger at Benji Wegg Prosser No. 10’s
> Director of Strategic Communications?
>
> Not vis-a-vis Taylor - he is McM’s gofer. - and paid to dig dirt on
> LibDems. But McM is plausibly deniable by BWP.
>
> BWP is very keen on the Online War. He is frustrated with what he
> sees as right-wing ascendancy online.
>
> Check the Google cache for the hastily pulled Gordon is a Moron blog.
>
> On 9/11/06, Tim Ireland wrote:
>> Of course, you’ll have to report this when it goes mainstream
>>
>> —– Original Message —–
>> From: “Guy Fawkes”
>> To: “Tim Ireland”
>> Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 5:14 PM
>> Subject: Re: boom
>>
>>
>> > All yours, am laughing.
>> >
>> > As I said before, he is a source. That buys him some protection.
>> > Doesn’t mean I don’t wish you well….
>> >
>> > On 9/11/06, Tim Ireland wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2006/09/david_taylor_rumbled.asp

The ‘others’ that Staines refers to here may well just be an ‘other’ as Taylor was only ever positively ID’d for having the one Brown-related domain name, unless Tim or anyone else knows otherwise.