Eagle Eye

Ben Chu: A word please, Prime Minister

2010-06-04T12:05:28Z

"How about that apology?"

The UK is now growing faster than France and Germany. The latest Office for National Statistics report suggests that UK GDP expanded by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, new Eurostat figures suggest that Germany expanded by 0.2 per cent and France by 0.1 per cent over the same period.

So can we expect a comment from David Cameron on this disparity? If the Prime Minister is consistent, we will get one.

Remember when economic figures last August showed France and Germany had exited recession with growth in the second quarter of 2009 of 0.3 per cent while the British economy contracted by 0.8 per cent? The Tory leader leapt on this as a significant moment and one full of political meaning.

He argued that: "In contrast to France and Germany, Britain is still shrinking and this shows how Gordon Brown has been getting it wrong on the economy."

So should we expect a comment from the new Prime Minister graciously admitting that Gordon Brown didn't do such a terrible job on managing the economy after all? Don’t hold your breath.

Ben Chu: Pity the passive bankers

2010-06-03T10:43:19Z

The rewards of passivity

The distinguished University of Chicago economist, Raghuram Rajan, has a partial defence of bankers' bonuses in the Financial Times today.

This is his answer to why the system so manifestly broke down with bankers taking vast bonuses - a considerable proportion in cash (see this research) - for deals which eventually turned bad.

"Irrational exuberance played a part, but perhaps more important were the political forces distorting the markets. The tsunami of money directed by a US Congress, worried about growing income inequality, towards expanding low income housing, joined with the flood of foreign capital inflows to remove any discipline on home loans. And the willingness of the Fed to stay on hold until jobs came back, and indeed to infuse plentiful liquidity if ever the system got into trouble, eliminated any perceived cost to having an illiquid balance sheet."

As Paul Krugman has often pointed out, the argument based on the Congressional push for cheap home loans to low-income families is a canard. Why was there such a bubble in commercial real estate if political pressure was the driving force of the US property boom?

So we're left with the influx of foreign capital from China and the Greenspan "put" of low interest rates as the "political forces" which, in Rajan's view, fatally distorted the system.

The trouble with this argument, it seems to me, is that it absolves the bankers' of any personal responsibility. In this world, bankers are merely passive players, unthinkingly responding to the distorted signals from the market place. But wasn't one of the great claims of these bankers in the boom years that they justified such fantastic rewards because they were brilliant at managing risk? Indeed, hadn't they invented a wonderful new system of securitisation whereby risk would be distributed to those most able to bear it? But no, they were just dumb pawns, pushed around by mighty political forces. Whatever happened to those omnipotent and omniscient Masters of the Universe?

Ben Chu: Cameron admits the true purpose of inheritance tax cuts

2010-06-02T14:30:16Z

A smart point from David Cameron at PMQs in response to Harriet Harman's probing over marriage tax relief.

The Prime Minister pointed out that the previous Government itself "recognised" marriage in the tax system when it legislated in 2007 to permit individuals to claim their late partner's inheritance tax allowance.

"If recognising marriage in the tax system is such a good thing for the better-off", asked Mr Cameron to Commons cheers, "why do we not do it for the less well-off?"

A nice way to puncture Labour's hypocrisy. But it was interesting that Mr Cameron argued that inheritance tax cuts benefit "the better off". As I recall, the Tory rhetoric on this has been that cutting inheritance tax is all about encouraging "aspiration" for all, rich and poor alike. Isn't this an admission that, at heart, it's just a bung to the already wealthy?

Mr Cameron has shelved the pre-election Tory plan to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. But if it ever resurfaces, perhaps today's admission should too.

Ben Chu: Where are the Labour complaints about the end of ID cards?

2010-05-26T14:29:06Z

The Queen's Speech contained a bill to scrap ID cards. So where were all those former Labour Home Secretaries to condemn this folly? David Blunkett? Charles Clarke? John Reid? Jacqui Smith? Alan Johnson? The silence has been deafening.

Perhaps they will raise their voices in protest when the bill is published. Let's hope so. Because if they don't I'm afraid a lot of people are going to be left wondering whether these former ministers ever really believed in the merits of ID cards in the first place.

Ben Chu: Will Irish eyes be smiling?

2010-05-26T14:02:39Z

Two sharply contrasting views on Ireland's economic future from two of its top economists quoted in an excellent Guardian feature today.

John FitzGerald, an economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute, "forecasts annual growth zooming up to as much as 5% between 2012 and 2015, before falling back to what he calls 'boring, European' levels". FitzGerald also argues that "leaving the euro would be lunatic".

David McWilliams, a former Irish Central Bank economist and someone who warned that the Celtic Tiger's bust was looming, regards all that as "horseshit", and laments the fact that "the establishment view is that we need more of the same".

Well, they can't both be right.

Watch this one closely. Ireland was the poster child for the neo-liberal right in the boom years with its weak regulation of finance and its ultra-low corporate tax rates. It's been the poster child for the right in the bust too, with Dublin's savage and early fiscal retrenchment. The right desperately need Ireland to bounce back quickly to validate their initial economic prescriptions for growth and also to support their arguments about the virtues of slashing public spending in the teeth of a recession.

Incidentally, Simon Johnson, of the Baseline Scenario, has a good analysis here showing why Ireland's status as a tax haven puts its public finances in an even worse state now.

"Roughly 20 percent of Irish gross domestic product (G.D.P.) is actually 'profit transfers' that raise little tax for Ireland and are owned by foreign companies. Since most of these profits are subject to the tax code, they are accounted for in Ireland where they are lightly taxed; they should not be counted as part of Ireland’s potential tax base. A more robust cross-country comparison would be to examine Ireland’s financial condition ignoring these transfers. This is easy to do: a nation’s gross national product excludes the profits of foreign residents. For most nations, gross national product and G.D.P. are near-identical, but in Ireland they are not. When we adjust Ireland’s figures accordingly, the situation is dire. The budget deficit was about 17.9 percent of G.N.P. in 2009"

Jon Davis: Civil servants back in the driving seat

2010-05-23T11:30:37Z

The return of Yes, Prime Minister to the scene is timely. For the loudest sigh of relief this month came from Whitehall. Not so much for the Con-Dem Nation assumption of power, though contrary to some New Labour ministers in 1997 the British civil service does look forward to a new government if only because a change can be as good as a rest (and new ministers can be putty in a grizzled mandarin’s hands). No, the almost palpable sense of joy emanating from senior civil servants can be encapsulated succinctly: ‘We’re back!’

The civil service was once thought of as the fourth service of the state after the navy, army and air force. For three decades after 1945 it enjoyed huge prestige, slyly embodied by Sir Humphrey Appleby and described by Rab Butler as ‘like a Rolls-Royce – you know it's the best machine in the world’. But British decline in the 1970s damaged the bureaucracy greatly.

Few people ever accused Mrs Thatcher of being a Trotskyist (certainly not to her face) but in terms of civil service reform she ushered in an era of perpetual revolution. Her wish to see it ‘deprivileged’ led to constant efficiency reviews, sackings and dismemberments which were enthusiastically followed up by her successor John Major. But it took the New Labour era, specifically the first two terms of Tony Blair, to drive the civil service down to its lowest ebb in the modern era.

There was an increased turnover of cabinet secretaries which saw Blair having four during his decade of power (Lord Butler of Brockwell, Lord Wilson of Dinton, Lord Turnbull and Sir Gus O’Donnell, right) compared to only six (including Butler) throughout the period 1945-1997. This was in some part due to Blair and his ministers’ deep frustration at the pace of change in the public sector.

For Blair tried to fundamentally change the role of the civil service from the traditional one of policy advice to project manager. The old idea that senior civil servants should be brilliant at writing beautifully structured policy documents (and complete the Times crossword in record time) but lacked the entrepreneurial skills necessary for the delivery of world class public services, was to be swept away with a new breed of bureaucrat. As Blair said in 1999, he bore ‘the scars on my back’ of attempting public service reform – ‘People in the public sector are more rooted in the concept that if it’s always done this way, it must always be done this way than any group of people I’ve come across.’

While it was understandable, indeed laudable, for Blair to try this, there was a crucial misunderstanding at the heart of his reform agenda. The civil service has always had the role of delivering public services – but it has also been the guardian of the constitution. In the absence of a codified constitution, we should be relieved that they have a ‘it must always be done this way’ mantra. To seek to dismantle the second role was misguided and dangerous. The stasis of civil service reform during the ‘events, dear boy, events’ Brown premiership was not entirely unwelcome after the hectic years of Blair.

Senior civil servants have resumed their role as the ‘continuity girls’ of the British constitution, ably and discreetly dispatching their duties making sure that the Queen’s Government carries on by providing high level secretarial support during the various negotiations along Whitehall. Furthermore, the whole political and economic scene was calmed before the election by the wise action of Sir Gus to agree and publish previously controversial conventions as to when a prime minister must resign after a hung parliamentary election. The ‘golden triangle’ of Cabinet Secretary, Prime Minister’s Permanent Secretary and the Queen’s Private Secretary proved their worth. Crisis was averted, the markets were stabilised and the civil servant’s thrill of non-recognition was preserved.

There may be greater thrills ahead. We now have coalition government between two parties who were just days ago describing each other as ‘jokes’. This will present its own stresses and strains but ones the civil service will relish. Providing the supporting processes for a coalition government will require both ingenuity and strength of character. Making sure that all ministers in the coalition feel like they are being treated equally will of course be a task for the Prime Minister and his Deputy – but the civil service will also need to play a key role in ensuring the mechanics of the coalition process deliver equal treatment, or at least the impression of it. There is little or no relevant experience in Whitehall of coalitions. The mandarins in the Scottish Government know the necessary intricacies and may well be a useful source of advice for their southern colleagues. But the generation of civil servants who have joined under the relative stability of New Labour and huge parliamentary majorities will be particularly stretched. The Cabinet Secretary and his permanent secretaries will need to show the sort of invisible visible leadership to their staff that only senior civil servants can.

This is what many, if not all, officials joined up for, to be at the centre, advising and serving ministers, right at the heart of government (as opposed to learning the ins and outs of a Job Centre+ in Teesside). As one senior official put it, coalition is going to be a ‘nightmare’ – accompanied with a wry smile.

Photo: DAVID ROSE

Jon Davis is Executive Director of the Mile End Group and Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.

Ben Chu: Shami's not shameless

2010-05-19T13:49:26Z

I saw the debate on Newsnight between Shami Chakrabarti and Lord Carlile yet came away with a different interpretation from my colleague John Rentoul.

Chakrabarti's essential argument was that if there is insufficient evidence to charge these two individuals they should be set free. Is that such a "shameless" position? I thought it was the basis of the British criminal law, whereby a person is considered innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial.

She also argued that if the police and the intelligence services still consider these individuals to pose a potential threat, they should be closely monitored. Again, is that a "shameless" position? If so, it's a shamelessness in which the police already acquiesce when it comes to non-terror cases. Sometimes the police suspect people of being involved in criminal conspiracies, yet they lack the evidence to charge them. What do they do? They put them under surveillance and attempt to gather that evidence with a view to eventual prosecution.

According to John, surveillance for foreign terror suspects would be either prohibitively expensive, intensely intrusive or ineffective. Yet what is the alternative? Should they be imprisoned indefinitely on the say so of the police, the intelligence services and Lord Carlile? Should they be put under the quasi house arrest of control orders? Should they be deported to face possible torture from the security forces in their home countries? All those options look pretty shameless to me.

Ben Chu: Honesty from the Milibands

2010-05-17T12:16:55Z

Ed Miliband says Labour needs to "face up to the scale of defeat" in the general election.

His brother David says: "we lost, and lost badly".

The clear implication is that Labour had no moral right in the eyes of the public to continue in power.

I think it is now incumbent on all those Labour-friendly commentators who were demanding a Lib-Lab coalition last week to either explain why the Miliband brothers are wrong, or to admit that they were advocating something that would have been inherently unstable and politically illegitimate. If we get silence we can presume the latter.

Ben Chu: The Age of Change? No thanks

2010-05-14T10:00:21Z

My colleague John Rentoul asks on this blog, "what about the newspaper's campaigns against banks charging for the services they provide, and against supermarkets for selling things that people want to buy cheaply and efficiently?". His implication seems to be that in this "age of change" The Independent should drop its campaign against penal bank charges on customers who go overdrawn and its concerns that supermarkets are using their market dominance to squeeze suppliers unfairly (see here for an example).

I don't know precisely what "age of change" means but if it means turning a blind eye to the abuses of powerful oligopolies, if it means accepting that everything done by the private sector is virtuous simply because it is the private sector, then, as Samuel Goldwyn once put it, include me out.

Tom Mendelsohn: Cameron in a different light

2010-05-14T08:43:17Z

Here's an astonishing thing doing the rounds: type 'David Cameron side profile' into Google's image search, and have a look at the first result. Then have another look. Rub your eyes, look away, then look back. Pinch yourself; you aren't dreaming.

If you can't be bothered with that, the picture is below. I don't want to spoil your surprise, so I'm making you click the 'read more' bit.

Tom Mendelsohn: All the latest in serious, up-to-the-minute political commentary

2010-05-13T13:45:45Z

This just in, from the Popbitch newsletter, an update on David Cameron:

JL writes:
"I live round the corner from Dave Cameron,
or at least I did until he became PM, and
saw him regularly in our local newsagent. The
other night he drove up in his people carrier
(nothing flash) and parked illegally on double
yellow lines. He went into the shop, bought
a bottle of red wine (they have a very rubbish
selection so it won't have been anything over
about six quid), then drove off again, homeward,
forgetting to put his headlights on. I saw him
again a couple of days later buying
tinned pineapple."

Make of that what you will.

Tom Mendelsohn: Jon Stewart has another look at our quainte olde politics

2010-05-13T13:16:08Z

American comedian and hero of the Left Jon Stewart has been mean about our elections on his television show again. It's very funny, again.

It won't let me embed the video, so have a look here.

Best line: 'Is it just me, or do these guys look like one of those before and after diet pictures?'

Tom Mendelsohn: Only in America

2010-05-12T15:47:43Z

I say 'only in America' when I guess I mean 'even in America'. The following video was rleased by Roy Moore, a candidate for governor of Alabama, who wants his electorate to know something about his opponent Bradley Byrne. I don't want to ruin the surprise, so watch it:

I know, right? Byrne once actually went as far as to claim that 'evolution... best explains the origins of life.' Furthemore, he even thinks that the Bible may not be 100% true, in this crazy world of ours.

I've got to say, hung parliaments and awkward coalitions aside, and debates on abortion limits notwithstanding, I am pretty glad that we don't have this sort of nonsense to put up with in Britain.

Tom Mendelsohn: The coalition on civil liberties

2010-05-12T14:40:14Z

The Conservative/Liberal coalition has published its agreement document this afternoon. You can see it here. There's plenty of interesting stuff in it, and it does really seem to be something of a synergy between manifestos - maybe the Conservatives come out on top in terms of victories, but the Liberals have won some important concessions. It'll be picked over in great depth in tomorrow's papers, so I won't discuss it all here.

What I will do, though, is publish the list of measures the two parties wish to take on civil liberties.

The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion.

This will include:

• A freedom or great repeal bill
• The scrapping of the ID card scheme, the national identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point database
• Outlawing the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission
• The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency
• Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database
• The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury
• The restoration of rights to non-violent protest
• The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech
• Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation
• Further regulation of CCTV
• Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason
• A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences

There's a lot of strong stuff in here. The multiple scrappings, of ID cards, national registers, biometric passports and Contact Point, will be seen as a significant victory for privacy campaigners. The restoration of non-violent protest is interesting, because it could well see a roll-back of one of the big symbols of Labour's authoritarianism: the banning of protests in Parliament Square. Does this mean Brian Haw can finally get a roof over his head and a hot bath? The review of libel laws could also prove significant, and maybe help stop libel tourists coming to Britain. Finally, the new mechanism to prevent unnecessary new criminal offences is also welcome, as the right sort of red-tape cutting.

Maybe we can all be a bit more optimistic about how this government is going to work now, please?

Tom Mendelsohn: The press conference just been

2010-05-12T14:07:49Z

Cameron and Clegg just gave their first joint press conference of the 'new politics' era. It was an extremely jolly affair, with journalists rolling in the aisles, and prime ministers and deputy prime ministers staring long and lovingly into each others' eyes.

The parity on display was remarkable - both men answered questions on a near-even footing. Cameron led as you'd expect, what with him being the boss, but Clegg was neither diminished nor undermined. The body language was very warm, and the two men were even joking about, in between gazing at each other adoringly. they evidently get on, which bodes well for all but their respective parties' fringes. One journo described the conference as 'a charming love-in', before wondering with the LDs' left and the Tories' right would be able to see past all this new-found chuminess. He was fobbed off.

There was much hilarity all round. Jon snow asked whether, 'if the phone rings at 3am - do you both have to answer it?'

Cameron said that he believes that the arrangement 'will succeed through its success'. He would probably admit that this is not a quote for the Oxford Companions to Political Histories.

The best bit came when Cameron was asked if he regretted saying that his favourite joke was 'Nick Clegg' .

"I'm afraid I did say that once," he said sheepishly, at which point Clegg marched off in a pretend huff. Cameron called: 'Come back!'.

This droll exchange led @jameskirkup to tweet the following:
Oh god. The country is now being run by two characters from a Richard Curtis film.

Quite.

It was basically like a gay wedding, but they do make a sweet couple.

Tom Mendelsohn: An unbalanced look at our new PM

2010-05-12T13:43:08Z

Martin Lewis, a fellow with whom I'm not familiar, but who seems to be one of the go-to Brits in Hollywood, has a few choice bons mots on David Cameron in The Huffington Post.

He now has the opportunity to follow in the tradition of the political hero he idolized in his youth, Margaret Thatcher, and do unto Britain's public health-care system, education system and poorest citizens exactly what he and his Champagne Charlie, Hooray Henry, Upper-Class Twit cronies did to Oxford's restaurants twenty years ago. Trash and wreck them. With the added bonus for him that, unlike his days in the Bullingdon Club when he and his fellow trust-fund brats at least paid for the damage they caused, now they can do this all for free.

Harsh words Martin. The article is funny, but I don't know that I agree with all of it. Cameron is a moderate Tory, he's patently not excessive in the way he lives, and we all have youthful indiscretions.

Ben Chu: Tim Montgomerie's flawed analysis

2010-05-12T12:37:06Z

It's getting pretty hard to escape Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home at the moment. Fair enough I suppose. He's managed to market himself to the media as the authentic voice of the Tory grassroots. And for all I know he does speak for them. But I'm not sure he talks unadulterated common sense though.

In his Guardian article today he compares Cameron's "silence" on immigration until late in the campaign to "keeping Wayne Rooney on the bench until the last game of the season". A few sentences later he laments Cameron's inability to appeal to ethnic minority voters. Perhaps I'm wrong but I doubt that a lusty blow on the old immigration dog whistle is going to help drive such voters into Camp Cameron.

Montgomerie also declares Lord Ashcroft's marginal seats operation "successful...The Conservatives won 21 more seats than if the national swing towards the party had been averaged evenly across the nation".

This sounds a bit suspect to me. There was a 5 per cent average swing from Lab to Con nationwide. Leave aside the Lib Dem/Tory battles and a glance at the top Conservative target list suggests this should theoretically have delivered roughly 88 seats. In the end the Tories won 97. Can this be put down to the strategy of Ashcroft (who incidentally owns Montgomerie's website)?

I trust the verdict of our own pollster John Curtice who argues: "The average swing in seats where Labour were defending a majority of 20 per cent or less was, at 5.6 per cent, only slightly above that across the UK as a whole. For all the controversy that Lord Ashcroft's funding of the Tory effort in marginal seats has caused, in the event it seems to have made very little difference at all".

Tom Mendelsohn: The end of the Liberal Democrats?

2010-05-12T11:13:27Z

Depending on who you speak to about our strange new coalition government, it's either the best thing to have happened to the Liberal Party in nearly a century, or the worst. The Independent's political commentator Michael Savage reckons that Nick Clegg's party secured huge concessions from the Tories, but there are plenty of doomsayers too.

For John B, a blogger at Liberal Conspiracy, for instance, the sky is falling in. He reckons that the Lib Dems are getting the 'poisoned chalice' cabinet positions, that they've rolled over on all their major manifesto promises in favour of nastier Tory ones, and that the pledge to have a referendum on AV will come to nothing. In fact, he's predicting major meltdown at the next election for a party that sold out.

For my part, I think the Liberals did what they had to do. The Lib-Lab-SDP-etc coalition would have been shaky to say the least and would have been pinioned by the 'coalition of losers' tag. And, evidently, not enough of the Labour bigwigs wanted it.

We needed a Government, and this is the stronger option for the Lib Dems, who will be able to effect more of the change they wanted to as insiders rather than outsiders. They get some power - even though Deputy PM is a bit of a sop position - they get the opportunity to shape policy in their own image, and they get to soften the more egregious Tory gambits. If this government succeeds, and if the LDs can be seen to be bringing a moderate touch to procedings, I see no reason for disgruntled lefties to flee to Labour, and I see no reason that they'll be slaughtered in the next polls.

Ben Chu: Liberal Democrat false consciousness?

2010-05-11T16:37:23Z

I'm very suspicious of all those Labour tribalists arguing that what Lib Dem activists and voters all want is a progressive coalition with Labour.
.
A good example of the genre from Tim Horton on Left Foot Forward here.

Horton brings some solid facts to the party such as this from a pre-election YouGov poll:

"43% of Lib Dem voters described themselves as centre-left or left, compared to 29% who described themselves as centrist and just 9% who described themselves as centre-right or right. 39% of Lib Dem voters described the Liberal Democrat party as being centre-left or left, compared to 33% of Lib Dem voters who described the party as being centrist and just 5% who described the party as being centre-right or right."

He goes on to suggest that a Lib-Con deal would result in Lib Dems rushing into the arms of Labour.

But if Lib Dem voters are all, at heart,Tory-hating lefties one wonders why they didn't just vote Labour in the election? The tribal Labour answer seems to be some sort of false consciousness. They can't seem to grasp that there is a genuine antipathy between the two parties.

Perhaps if the Labour leadership had properly engaged with the Lib Dems, their efforts to form a coalition might have gone better.

Ben Chu: Beware two-party thinking

2010-05-11T11:23:17Z

I think there's a real danger of people looking at these coalition talks and seeing what they want to see.

Paddy Ashdown was on Today this morning arguing that a Lib/Lab pact would be "legitimate" because a majority of the British electorate, 52 per cent, voted for those two parties. (29 per cent Labour, 23 per cent Lib Dem).

Undoubtedly true. And a good rebuttal to those who argue that a Lib/Lab pact would be a "coalition of the losers".

But consider that a Lib/Con pact would also be "legitimate" because a majority of the British electorate voted for those two parties too. And the popular mandate of that pact would be arguably greater, at 59 per cent of the vote. (36 per cent Conservatives, 23 per cent Lib Dem).

There's a tendency among some on the left, as Giles Wilkes of the Freethinking Economist has pointed out, to assume that a Lib/Lab pact is somehow the only legitimate coalition that can emerge from these dealings - not just desirable, but legitimate. Why? Because a Lib Dem vote was obviously, in their eyes, an anti-Tory vote. For me, that's two-party thinking - and something that the Lib Dems should be keen to repudiate.

Ben Chu: Brown-baiting to Brown sugar

2010-05-10T18:24:24Z

I've abhorred the media's Brown-baiting in recent years.

But, equally, Brown shouldn't be exalted now that he's announced he's going.

The idea seems to have got around that Brown nobly accepted personal responsibility for Labour's defeat in the general election. But what he actually said this afternoon was:

"The reason that we have a hung parliament is that no single party and no single leader was able to win the full support of the country. As leader of my party I must accept that that is a judgement on me."

Accepting that you did not win the "full support" of the country (just like your rivals, mind) is surely not really the same as accepting that the public rejected you and that you led your party to defeat.

Ben Chu: Tories for fair votes part 2

2010-05-09T18:04:59Z

This from John Redwood:

"Does he [Gordon Brown] recognise that if you lose around 100 seats and fall substantially in the popular vote, if you come a poor second , it is possible that the country does not want you to remain as Prime Minister?"

Sounds like another Conservative who thinks that the popular vote ought to matter, even though under our system (which, remember, the Tories like) it matters not one iota.

Will Mr Redwood and Fraser Nelson and all those other Conservatives who seem to feel there's something unfair about the result of the election follow the logic of their position through and conclude that the answer lies in electoral reform?

I'm not holding my breath.

Ben Chu: Tories for fair votes

2010-05-09T12:24:29Z

Fraser Nelson in the News of the World:

"The Tories won TWO MILLION more votes than Labour. A greater share than Blair's last election...The voters have spoken. Cam inspired the greatest Tory comeback since 1931. But the Westminster system is slanted against the Tories."

Sign up another convert to proportional representation?

Sadly, I suspect what Nelson would like is not PR, but a spot of gerrymandering under the present system to favour the Tories.

Ben Chu: Reasons for Liberal Democrats to be cheerful

2010-05-09T10:25:21Z

Cheer up!

The evaporation of the surge on polling day has left many of the party's supporters downhearted. And if the Liberal Democrats do a deal with the Tories, as is surely likely, there will be further dejection.

But I would suggest there are also reasons for liberals - both big l and small l - to be moderately pleased at the result of this election.

1) Defeat for the anti-liberal press. They went into full on scare-mongering mode about the Liberal Democrats and the perils of a hung parliament. They fell in strongly behind the Tories. They put their credibility on the line. And now, with this result, that credibility lies in tatters. So does their influence. Politicians have courted the right wing media vote so assiduously these past two decades because they believe these newspapers influence voters. Less influence over voters should lead to less influence for these bastions of illiberalism. (Incidentally, the Telegraph leader on Saturday claimed that the Libs "lost votes". Er, no their number of votes nationwide increased by 846,064. The Times leader on the same day claimed that the Libs' share of the vote has "fallen back to 21 per cent". No, it rose by 1 per cent on 2005 to 23 per cent. It's one thing for the Tory press to talk down Lib support before the votes are cast. Trying to do it after polling day is embarrassingly desperate).

2) The swingometer is an unreliable guide. The Libs lost Montgomeryshire (majority 7,173) but held on in Eastleigh (majority 568) and Somerton and Frome (majority 812). The Tories took Kingswood (Lab majority 7,873) but failed to take Bolton North East (Lab majority 4,103). There was even a mild swing to Labour in Scotland. As our pollster John Curtice has noted, the Ashcroft strategy of ploughing money into top marginals doesn't seem to have had much effect. The average swing to the Tories in the exit poll was right. But the story was considerable regional and local variation. If that variation is here to stay, the Lib Dems, as the least well-resourced of the three large parties and the canniest local fighters could well benefit.

3) This will be a shackled Tory government. There might not be electoral reform, but with the Lib Dems in a position of influence, there will be no crude gerrymandering now (see the fears of our political editor, Andy Grice, here). There will be no stunts on repatriating powers from Europe. The Thatcherite Tory right know this, which explains their own despondency at this result.

4) Clegg is, at this moment, the most important politician in Britain. A few years ago David Cameron was asked to tell a political joke. His response? "Nick Clegg". Well now the joke is on Cameron. He's sitting across the negotiating table from Mr Clegg discussing the division of power. I agree with those who argue that this is a monent of great potential danger for the Liberal Democrats. But it is also a monent of great potential opportunity. After all, politics is about power. And now the Liberal Democrats have some. If they act wisely, why shouldn't they end up with still more?

Ben Chu: Clegg green light to Tory minority administration?

2010-05-07T10:19:56Z

Here's Clegg's words outside Lib Dem HQ:

"I have said that whichever party gets the most votes and the most seats has the first right to seek to govern, either on its own or by reaching out to other parties and I stick to that view... I think it is now for the Conservative Party to prove that it is capable of seeking to govern in the national interest."

That "on its own" seems rather significant. Seems to be giving the green light to form a minority administration. If it had just been "by reaching out to other parties" that would have been saying "it's up to you, David, to make me a decent offer". As it is, I can't see what leverage the Lib Dems retain.