A Discredited Republic

Given that FIFA get away with so much in general, I am enjoying it that at least Joseph Blatter (no matey ‘Sepp’ here) is squirming in his own ordure. It proves Socrates’ point (via Plato) that while good men will tend to unite around a noble cause, bad men will eventually fall out with each other, creating disorder.
The conniving and chicanery involved is astounding. It seems that to scupper Mohammed bin Hamman’s candidacy, Blatter got his ally, Chuck Blazer, to accuse bin Hamman and the latter’s ally, Jack Warner, of corruption, thus removing a serious threat to Blatter’s power. If so, it is a pyrrhic victory for although Blatter will now be, Soviet-style, the only candidate for the FIFA presidency, Warner knows where all the bodies are buried and is intent on blackmailing the (un)ethics committee into rescinding his suspension. Given the ethics committee lacklustre performance into FIFA governance (Committee: “Did you know of or were involved in any corruption.” Blatter: “No.” Committee: “Okay. Fine by us.” Five months earlier, replace Blatter with Spain/Portugal and Qatar), it is extraordinary that they did act against bin Hamman and Warner and Warner clearly feels the ethics committee is politically compromised. That they are the only source of 'authority' to which FIFA is accountable is akin to getting bent detectives to investigate criminal conspiracies.
Blatter runs as the candidate to clear up the mess in FIFA yet the Augean Stables are in such a state largely because of him. When the sponsors get jittery and FIFA Executive Committee members start slinging mud at each other, this is more than sour grapes from British journalists bitter over the failed 2018 bid. It is fascinating. It’s just a pity that the sclerotic and feeble FA is incapable of taking advantage to instigate reform. It needs to sort itself out before it can properly represent England on the world stage, which hopefully the parliamentary investigation going on will force upon it. Bleating about postponing the FIFA presidency election along with the Scottish FA (hardly a paradigm of efficiency) is the same as Lear raging at the wind with his fool. The trouble with taking a principled stand is that a lot of football associations around the world come from countries where corruption is endemic and those in high positions (such as head of a sports association) have got there by connections and nefarious means and the shenanigans at FIFA must come across as small beer. Also, they are fully aware that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Warner, though, isn’t prepared to take the humiliation being suspended lying down. An odious man at the best of times, I am loving his declaration of war against FIFA. The email about Jermome Valcke (a man convicted in an American court of being a compulsive liar as commercial director, stepping down for a year before being brought back by Blatter in an even more rarefied role as FIFA General Secretary) was alleging that Qatar had bought the 2022 bid, according to Warner is not even the start of the tsunami he is going to unleash on world football – such a sensitive person to choose such a word a few months after the devastation in Japan.
Another intriguing facet of FIFA is that they are all men. Maybe Blatter banned women from important positions because they wouldn’t wear tight-fitting tops and shorts.

Amid all the kerfuffle about who should head the IMF and Cheryl Cole being axed from the US X-Factor comes a story that dwarfs these in importance. The capture and pending extradition of Ratko Mladic is a great moment. On a par with it, is the arrest of another bogeyman from the mid-1990s, former Hutu militia leader Bernard Munyagishari, ending his 17 year flight from justice. Interestingly, both were apprehended in neighbouring countries to their homelands, Mladic in Serbia and Munyagishari in the Democratic Republic of Congo, probably because Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda were extensively scoured for them. May they both rot in jail for the rest of their lives at the very least (Munyagishari might be executed, though I think a life jail term for such a person might be more excruciating). These moments hopefully will allow the Balkans and Rwanda if not to move on from their pasts, at least lay some ghosts to rest. It has been a long time in coming.

Well, I might as well combine Ryan Giggs’ alleged indiscretion with a few things to say about the conclusion of this season’s Premier League. I knew that Giggs was the player at the heart of the storm about a super-injunction a week before his cover was finally blown in the House of Commons and virtually everyone I knew was in the same camp. I am not on Twitter and not many I know subscribe to that service either. So all this flak this Liberal Democrat MP, John Hemming is receiving is as much a joke as the semantic hoops jumped by English-based newspapers before today. Ironically, Max Clifford (who else?), publicist to Imogen Thomas (the woman alleged to have had the affair with Giggs), said that if Giggs had not taken out the super-injunction (thereby naming Ms Thomas as the party that this was primarily aimed at), it may never have come to light.
Anyway, fighting fire with ice is only a temporary tactic, as once the steam clears away (as it inevitably will), you’re still going to be revealed in an unflattering way. Fight fire with fire and you may get burnt but so will the journalists who target you. Such hacks claim that no-one wants to know about them, but a rich celebrity could hire a platoon of private detectives to harass them in their private arena, even ruin their lives and families by posting anonymous fake information or doctored photos to their houses. They would never know who was doing it because I imagine they would have built up a list of quite a few celebrities they had ticked off, but subsequently they may treat others as they expect to be treated themselves.
At least two people yesterday said Giggs should not have been named as, unlike Tiger Woods, he had not cultivated an image of himself to sell things. Admittedly, Giggs was not a commercial whore, but he often boasted of how boring he was, tucked up in bed early, not going out to night clubs and such. He projected this wholesome portrait and then you get these idiots who just want to attack John Hemming flaunting their ignorance on media platforms by saying Giggs was not a hypocrite and should not have been exposed. Giggs doesn’t need to, but these studio guests are wankers.
As for the end of the season, the FA needs to be yanked by politicians, have all its vested interests shaken out of it and put on a stable footing that can so ‘no’ to the Premier League before FIFA and UEFA kick up a stink about political interference. Taking a laissez-faire attitude to the FA is no sustainable. League games should never have been staged on the same day as the FA Cup Final and now the Final is being moved to 5.15 pm from next season to accommodate more league games. It is a disgrace because the FA is in the pocket of the Premier League. That’s why it is the FA who fines clubs for playing ‘below-par’ sides - the vassal is protecting the product being sold around the world. It therefore looks foolish by bringing in a 25 player squad rule.
As for Richard Scudamore, let Birmingham City’s relegation stick in his craw. This sleazy schmoozer said there was no chance of a winter break because the League Cup was valued by clubs – this same League Cup that so exhausted Birmingham with injuries and extra games. For the bigger clubs it is just a trinket – nothing more. It needs to be abolished so a winter break can be introduced. Of course, the League Cup is just a smokescreen because the Premier League get more money for league games when all other major European leagues are on their winter breaks. Scudamore argues against all that is right and decent in football, while taking the credit for glories that would have occurred irrespective of his actions.
Newcastle United had an average season and were just several minutes away from a top half finish and non-negative goal difference. In the end, 12th place is the bare minimum of acceptability in a very weak top flight. Despite selling the main striker, NUFC have not struggled for goals, scoring the most in more than a decade at this level (even more than during seasons where qualification for the Champions League was secured). NUFC even ended up outscoring fifth-placed Tottenham Hotspur. A decent striker is needed but the story has to be counter-balanced by the goals conceded and the defence has to be beefed up as well. Mike Williamson is just a lump who we got on the cheap from Portsmouth. He’s tall and large and as a defender in the Championship is quite effective but it is not enough in the Premier League. Danny Simpson and James Perch alternating at right-back seem weak links at right back and there is no cover for Jose Enrique at left back (who might be sold anyway). The midfield of Cheik Tiote, Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton and Jonas Gutierrez, with Hatem ben Arfa to come back from injury next season seems to be the least in need of improvement, yet the first signings in the close season are midfielders (on frees of course). The manager, Alan Pardew, doesn’t exactly fill with me with enthusiasm – I don’t see him as top-drawer but it sums up a board who seem to lack ambition and sell players to those they can squeeze the most money from, no matter the impact on team shape or spirit. They claim it is the Arsenal strategy to take young talents and sell them on for a higher price after a few years. Saying this just proves they know nothing about football. Arsenal take young talents and nurture them to become high achievers, only selling them on once they are past their sell by date or have no further use. The Newcastle board are actually following the Wigan strategy, which is no surprise considering the business empires of the owners of each club. Hardly inspiring, is it – only seeking to avoid relegation. Most football fans can dream in the summer season – if only Newcastle United fans had that luxury.

Big congratulations to Porto for beating Braga in last night's Europa League Final (even though I was unaware that it was going on until this morning). Andre Villas Boas, in his first season in management, wins the Portuguese league at a canter and bags the trophy of Europe's second tier competition. Who would bet against him following the path of his mentor Jose Mourinho and winning the Champions League with Porto next season? "Once I was the apprentice, now I am the master." Yet it would be Mourinho who would be Darth Vader in these circumstances.

Instructive

This interview with the New York Times columnist speaks so much to me about what I've thought for ages. The idea that we are not rational but rather overwhelmingly unconscious social animals, is something that I've taken up with gusto since I read that 99% of our decisions are based on our personalities - the only occasions where we make a non-predetermined choice is when we are denied any time to think about it. Even indecision is a choice, if unconscious, to do nothing or delay doing something, that comes from who we are.
Also, I've believed for years about the deleterious effects of radical social liberalism combined with extreme economic liberalism. The Labour party of 1960s made state policy that would have been fine if it hadn't been for the Conservative policies of the 1980s (and arguably vice versa). If we want a contrast with our social disconnect, just look at the European continent which went through much of what Britain did in the 1960s but doesn't have the problems (where there are problems of isolation, such as in parts of France, there are historical reasons particular to that country). One survey that struck me a couple of years ago showed that people in the least loneliest city in the UK today feel more lonely than those in the most loneliest city forty years ago.
I disagree with the him of 2003 over the Iraq invasion, as I was dead-set against it at the time, the lies it was based upon being so transparent, but he admits he was blind on that issue so that's good too.
Anyway, I'll let Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/19/david-brooks-big-idea-society) have his head with Brooks below:

When David Brooks was a boy, he had two turtles named Gladstone and Disraeli. How come? "There's a New York Jewish culture that has a saying 'Think Yiddish, act British'," says Brooks. "My background was filled with Anglophile Jews. Jews of a certain generation, really my grandfathers' generation, gave each other names they thought would help them fit in – Irving, Sydney, Milton and Norman – and now in the US those are not English names any more, they're Jewish names. And I was brought up in that culture. Hence the turtles."

Hence much more than that. Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he's planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic.

"I am very British in that I'm reticent. There's a survey of how many times people in different countries touch each other during an hour over coffee. In Rio it was 180, in Paris 120. London, zero." How about new York? "Maybe 40? I feel very at home here." We're sitting in the Cinnamon Club, an Indian restaurant in Westminster frequented by policy wonks, and he looks more diffident than the only Englishman at our table. I resist the counter-cultural urge to play footsie.

But what's important about Brooks is not so much that he acts British, but that he thinks British. His new book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, is steeped in the anti-rationalist philosophical reflections of the British Enlightenment. And this is no ordinary book: even before publication this week it has become, according to Times columnist Rachel Sylvester, "the must-read text for politicians searching for a new prism through which to examine the apparently intractable challenges of social immobility, school dropout rates, welfare dependency and crime". Education secretary Michael Gove believes it contains vital clues for turning around failing schools; universities minister David Willetts reckons it may help define modern Conservatism; policy minister Oliver Letwin thinks it articulates the cherished Tory notion of the Big Society. The book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting Brooks this week, and Steve Hilton, the PM's top strategist, has invited him to hold a seminar at No 10 on Friday.

Brooks hails British rather than French Enlightenment thinkers as the guys who really understood what makes the social animal tick. While Voltaire, Condorcet and Descartes used reason to confront superstition and feudalism, thinkers across the Channel – Brooks cites Burke, Hume and Adam Smith – thought it unwise to trust reason. Rather, and here Brooks quotes Hume with approval: "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions."

Why is The Social Animal so important if it just dusts off old thoughts of Brits from 200-plus years ago? First, Brooks argues misplaced faith in human rationality has underpinned policy-making for too long. Second, research in neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology stressing the importance of our non-rational minds can, if applied, create a better world.

Brooks says that, overwhelmingly, human decision-making is not rational but unconscious. Much of the book's pleasure consists in reading digests of experiments (such as international differences in the incidence of touching during coffee) that show how non-rational we are and yet how successful the social animal when breaking free of mere rational decision-making. The style and substance will be familiar to readers of pop psychology bestsellers such as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist: for Brooks the unconscious isn't a seething Freudian netherworld of sexual urges, but where we make the key decisions of our lives – whom to date and marry, how to vote.

Most success stories stress academic ability, IQ, hard work, he argues. Brooks rather stresses non-cognitive skills, which, he writes, is "the catch-all category for hidden qualities that can't be easily measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment." "By that I mean emotions, intuitions, genetic inheritance. Soft stuff, which is pretty rich given that my wife thinks I'm insufficiently touchy feely."

And what are these mysterious non-cognitive skills? Good character (energy, honesty, dependability, recognising your weaknesses and controlling your worst impulses). He also mentions "street smarts", by which he means reading situations and people, often unconsciously, and developing human relationships. He thinks these skills can be honed.

He gives examples of policy-making without non-cognitive street smarts. "When we invaded Iraq we were blind to the social problems that would be involved. We didn't realise they didn't trust us." Hold on – didn't he write a New York Times column urging invasion? "I did. I was so blind about it. In that column I wondered what Michael Oakeshott [the British conservative political philosopher] would have said. He would have said: this society is very complicated and you should be circumspect in thinking about what you can achieve, and that invading to install democracy without trust is doomed. And then I wrote: 'Having said that, I think we should invade.'"

Another example is the banking crisis, which, he reckons, happened because we trusted bankers. "Many thought we should let these rational wealth-seekers get on with it. We shouldn't."

The Social Animal's thesis is expressed through the form of a novel. He creates a couple, Harold and Erika, he from a rich background, she from a broken family in a disorganised neighbourhood, and traces them through their formative years, marriage, careers, retirement and death. The book has become a US bestseller and is worth reading – even if with mounting exasperation – since it seems to promise answers to some of western society's deepest problems: how to generate social mobility and reform a non-society devoid of mutual trust and bristling with security cameras.

No wonder leading Tories welcome Brooks. He is to the Big Society agenda what Richard Layard was to Labour's happiness philosophy and Richard Sennett was to Blair's respect agenda. "The Big Society appeals to me because I don't think appealing to people as individuals gets you far. Many social problems are caused by insufficient social capital. Kids are brought up in broken homes and crime-ridden neighbourhoods; they don't go to university because they're not attached to their schools . . . to solve these problems you need to build dense social networks. You have to get beyond treating people as rational machines who respond to the economic incentives."

Brooks thinks his book, written with the US in mind, speaks to British problems. He quotes the jeremiads of self-styled Red Tory Phillip Blond about Britain having become a bipolar nation in which a bureaucratic, centralised state presides over a fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. "I get to where Blond is by arguing that there have been two individualist revolutions. Conservatives embraced the individualism of the market and reacted furiously if the state impinged on individual economic choice." Brooks writes that one consequence of this is chains such as Walmart closing local shops, destroying networks of community those shops created.

"There's also a liberal revolution in the moral sphere that says the state shouldn't impinge on choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women. That liberal revolution also took religion out of the public square. Together these revolutions undermine communal trust and law and order." It also, he writes in the Social Animal, led to welfare policies that "enabled lonely young girls to give birth out of wedlock, thus decimating the habits and rituals that led to intact families".

Perhaps the fact that you're a self-described socialist will appeal to Ed Miliband, I suggest to Brooks. "Yes, but my socialism doesn't value state over society. It favours a more communitarian style of politics. The point is to ensure that people from different classes feel united in a common enterprise. When I meet Ed Miliband, I might ask if my kind of socialism appeals, or if he's stuck with the old one."

My hunch is that Brooks's socialism would make Miliband queasy. In the book, he eulogises charter schools – schools that get public money but are granted autonomy from state control in exchange for producing certain results, notably targeting kids from tough backgrounds. Erika, his character from a tough background, manages to get to just such a school established by a billionaire hedge fund trader.

But aren't charter schools anti-egalitarian, don't they stop people from different classes feeling united in a common enterprise? "These schools are unequal, but in an unequal society you need that. Poor kids need different things from schools than rich kids because they often don't have the structure in their homes or neighbourhoods to give them a chance of success and most schools don't help with that."

Isn't there a risk that decentralisation undermines your socialism? "Yeah. What I want to say to David Cameron is that if you decentralise power you risk getting rid of a basic level of fairness and equality. And you risk creating separate communities that don't talk to each other." Brooks cites Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee who on Tuesday rounded on Eric Pickles's localism bill. "It was a good article because it argued that when budget deficits are cut the poor are at greater risk. Not that I'm saying cutting the deficit is wrong; it's right, but it needs not to fall on the poorest hardest."

Brooks tells me he is a fan of Anthony Trollope, something not admitted by a public figure since John Major. He recently gave a talk to New York's Trollope Society about the novel The American Senator. "In it the senator scorns British political institutions, arguing they're absurd and irrational. The Lords? Ridiculous. But what Trollope felt when he ridicules that senator, and what I share, is a belief in institutions to achieve communal goals and how wrong it is to try to impose rationalistic models on existence."

How un-American. Brooks reminds me of a reverse Jonathan Freedland. While Freedland's book Bring Home the Revolution argued the egalitarian ideas of American revolution should be imported to reform Britain's insufficiently rational polity, Brooks seems to be arguing that it doesn't matter that Britain's political institutions aren't rational, just that they need to be infused with more communal spirit and funky-sounding streets smarts. Whether that's a message Britain wants to hear is another matter.

Euroaudiovision

For the first time in years, longer than I can remember doing so, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest in its entirety. The British entry Blue did respectably, concluding the night with 100 points and (just) finishing in the top half of 25 countries. It was a good single (‘I can’) but generic ultimately and on Monday morning the tune hasn’t really stuck in the mind. Which, for better or worse, can not be said of Jedward, the brothers Grime. They had a melody for ‘Lipstick’ which still twangs in the mind 48 hours later and wearing ridiculous, red-sequinned blazers boasting out-size shoulder straps, they bopped around manically, irrespective of synchronisation with the tune or each other. And they were fun, reflected in the higher placing of them over Blue.
The biggest shock was Azerbaijan winning the whole shebang. It was a pretty song but unremarkable compared to some other entries. Some might even argue that if Israel is included for its European tradition, Azerbaijan has more of an Asian heritage, any Euro inclinations deriving from long domination by Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. At least the UK can claim a small win through its British-born female lead vocalist (something that Romania did as well). It will be interesting to have it staged along the shores of the Caspian Sea though.
What was disappointing was for a European singing competition so many of the entrants delivered their verses in English. This is not exactly a new phenomenon and, of course, it is designed to garner international success but it is a shame only three non-English native speaking countries delivered their whole submission in the language they were born to (and a few others having a hybrid, parts done in English, others in their mother tongue). Maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising that France, Serbia and Spain suffered in the final vote (Spain’s performance was criminally undervalued).
I liked Hungary, Spain and Sweden particularly, though most of the songs were decent enough. All three has high-class pop as their theme. As the voting results progressed and it seemed clear which way the points were going, I hoped Sweden would take the crown but they faltered in the final reckoning. Some of the acts were amusing for their ‘uniqueness’, to put it kindly. Georgia sang with a woman who looks similar to one of the senior employees at the place I work and most of the lyrics seemed to have been hauled at random from an English thesaurus. Moldova was absolutely ridiculous with those long pointy hats and a girl in what looked like a bridal gown peddling around on a unicycle. I predicted correctly that Switzerland’s entry was so dull it would finish bottom and, duly, it did.
Graham Norton did a sterling commentary, as waspish as Terry Wogan used to be, while praising those he thought worthwhile (I reserved the right to disagree with some of his picks). The arena held around 35,000 – the size of a mid-sized football stadium I thought to myself – and that was what it turned out to be, converted very impressively. The German hosts were mainstream and inoffensive and thus the humour pandered to the lowest common denominator but they were effective in regard to the real business at hand.
So Eurovision is gone for another year, but the UK is now, hopefully, on the right track. They have the template with Blue and know that if they score between 5 - 6 points for each of the 43 participating countries they should win (Azerbaijan won with an average of about 5.1). Some states haven’t won for 40 - 50 years and that can’t be put down solely to tactical voting – this year’s top two, the Azeris and the Italians don’t have very strong connections with their neighbours (e.g. Portugual giving Spain twelve points or, a little surprisingly until you consider the ethnic make-up, Croatia and Bosnia giving hefty points to Serbia). Maybe other nations are bemused that we have followed one Irish-born compere with another and so don’t give the rights to hosting as a result (though the public face to Europe was the delectable Alex Jones when delivering the UK’s results). The UK surely has too strong a music culture to not win it in the near future.

It's balmy oop north

It is one week since the Scottish National Party learned that they had gained an absolute majority under a system devised to prevent exactly that scenario. Some socialist and Marxist historians may pooh-pooh history as ‘the biographies of great men’ but Alex Salmond has lead his party almost to the sunlit uplands of independence and I would express severe doubt over whether anyone in his party could have achieved anything similar. He is, simply, the most charismatic and competent British politician of his generation
Yet he has had to risk his health to rescue his party. He relinquished the top spot on the advice of his doctors but had to step back up to the plate, when the SNP were dead in the water under John Swinney’s tenure. For the SNP to achieve their ultimate goal, Salmond has to stay at the helm. There is no-one else.
This was made clear in the interview Nicola Sturgeon MSP had with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Wednesday. Either she was obsessed with a referendum on independence that she was rendered inoperative to answer any other question or she was a really poor communicator. I’m guessing it was a 60/40 split respectively. In ten minutes she must have mentioned “the Scottish people will decide the best interests of Scotland” at least twenty times, contriving at one point to say it three times in the space of a single sentence. Paxman must have been in mellow mood, handing her enough rope to hang herself rather than pressing home that she wasn’t answering his questions. Again and again, he asked for specifics in different parts of policy - domestic and international – and while she occasionally broke from her trance to offer a modicum of detail, she always concluded that she couldn’t really say anything because it was “for the Scottish people to decide the best interests of Scotland.” It was unbelievably wooden and stilted. Modern voters aren’t interested in such Pinnochio politics; they just find it laughable.
There is, Westminster’s Scottish Affairs committee (Labour chaired and with a single SNP MP among its 11 members) concluded in a recent report, “a strong element of both a grievance and a dependency culture in Scottish politics.” I still remember a debate about four or five years ago, when the novelist Ian Rankin said that many Scots were quite chippy and one Scottish Nationalist piped up, querying that was anything wrong to being chippy. It is this tendency that Salmond seeks to suppress, giving the impression that he runs a party that is forward-looking, not seeking to blame anyone else. The Liberal Democrat collapse helped immensely, but their erstwhile voters chose the SNP as their home because of Salmond’s sure hand at conveying modernity and sense. All in all though, Scottish independence is still more popular in England than north of the border.

Power to the people - the opposite more like

The Labourites who voted against the Alternative Vote (AV) system because they wanted to hurt the Liberal Democrats seem to be lacking mental faculties over this issue. I know that this accounts for more than half of Labour voters but there you go. These Labour agents normally have contempt for the Lib Dems, seeing them as a mere pale imitation of Labour and a ‘progressive’ distraction – not of the pure faith, but heretics. It was their clan’s leaders that were in the ascendancy in coalition talks, scorning the Lib Dems concerns and seeing them as an adjunct to further propagate Labour party policy. Having driven the Lib Dems into the arms of the Conservatives (as well as the figures not quite adding up), they are now really angry at this ‘betrayal’. They lap up the unpopularity of the Lib Dems over controversial policies and hope to go for the party’s jugular in a way they haven’t been able to do since the ‘Gang of Four’ broke away to form the Social Democrat Party (SDP) – another bone of contention towards the Lib Dems, who are the successor party to the Liberals’ alliance with the SDP. Yet in siding with the Tories to defeat the AV referendum, the real ‘progressive’ turncoats are not the Lib Dems but themselves. Their blinkered, tribal approach means they can’t see the big picture. They cut off their nose to spite their face last Thursday.
Their supposed overall leader, Ed Miliband, can see the big picture – he is a strategist, as he was in the leadership election, as he is now; not just a pretty face (some would be crueller after witnessing him congratulate Labour activists in Gravesham, Kent with considerable dried saliva clinging to his lower lip). He sees the short-term damage. To the tribalists, opposing AV is just a way to stamp their principles, even if in defiance of their party leader. To the general public, Labour looks like a divided party and that is why it didn’t do as well as expected in the local elections and in Scotland (only Wales bucking the trend).
Miliband the younger also sees the long-term punishment. The AV referendum was only Part One of electoral reform; the sweetener for the Tories to get them to vote for it was the boundary changes. Ostensibly, it is to equalise the size of constituencies and make each MP responsible for roughly the same number of voters. But it will hit Labour hardest, eviscerating their number of strongholds in the inners cities and sparsely populated areas of Wales and Scotland. There will be fewer MPs after 2015, overwhelmingly at a cost to centre-left parties. AV would have cushioned this blow for the ‘progressives’. Labour regressives (for that is what they are) think that the spending cuts will make the Colaition unpopular and one big push will return them to power and in a way that they won’t have to share it. Such a mindset kept the Tories from government for 13 years. Imagine the changes top the country if Labour are kept from office until 2023. By voting down AV, this has made that prospect a lot more likely.
I supported AV, as did virtually everyone I knew outside of my workplace, not because it represented a full stop or closure on reform but because it was fairer than what is currently on offer, which is the equivalent of the nineteenth century ‘rotten boroughs’. In 2005, Labour got a 50+ seat majority with only 35% of the vote (and only a fifth of the total registered electorate). In 2010, the Liberal Democrat share of the vote went up but their number of MPs went down – if that isn’t a broken system, I don’t know what is. The exemplar of this failing system is 1983 when the Liberals/SDP Alliance got 25% of the electorate behind them and Labour got 27%, but despite that 2% difference, Labour got 208 seats and the Alliance ten times fewer MPs. First past the post is rotten to the core. No new democracy of the last twenty-five years has adopted it. No campaigners happily turned it around without answering it by saying that none of them took up AV either. However, let us remind ourselves that in the Coalition negotiations this was all the Tories would countenance in case they lost the referendum. Even in the USA, which is hailed as a place where first past the post works given the domination of the two-party system, is failed by this process – in 2000 (forget Nader and the Supreme Court), Al Gore got a million more votes than George W Bush and still lost. A rickety two hundred-year old system designed for 13 states and three million people can’t cope with 50 states and 350 million people. First past the post is antediluvian.
The success of the No campaign has been nasty, dirty and personal. If the Yes campaign had stooped to such low tactics they might have a had a chance. Their television campaign explained the merits of AV without hyperbole; the No TV advert by contrast clearly implied that the British people were too stupid to understand AV. Add in the falsehood-peddling billboard ads and public pronouncements and you have, in the words of Lord Ashdown, a “regiment of lies.” Moreover, the Yes campaign revealed who their donors were early on, with the No campaign temporising claiming that they would unveil them on conclusion of the referendum – there is still no word but no-one of any sense truly believed such lowlifes would keep their word.
The primary aim now must be to press for a fully elected House of Lords, the nominal upper chamber. Lord Reid (or Lard Reid to give him his native Scottish burr) attacks any notion of “electoral reform via the back door.” This has-been politician therefore proves he’s not just against AV but all worthwhile democracy and will do his utmost to sully his country’s image and procedure. To keep the life experience of members of the Lords – its biggest asset – elections should be by proportional representation (the standard transferable vote) with a party list that grandees would be plucked from to sit on the benches. That should satisfy everyone interested in fairness but the narrative of politics is about winners and losers (expect the Tories to mount a rearguard action to defeat any attempt at this) – some will always try to keep as much power from the voters as possible, even if that means tricking them.

Congratulations to Porto and Braga for making it to the Europa League Final and making it an all northern Portugal affair.

This kerfuffle, racheted up by media hostile to Presdient Barack Obama, over the story of what happened and how it did in the killing of Osama bin Laden is an attempt to detract from a positive story, one that reflects well on Obama. The main thing is that the architect of modern-day global terrorism is now dead. Nothing else matters (although the information garnered from the compound and the hard and flash drives there could ultimately be more significant). There should have been no chances taken with him as he might have been concealing a suicide belt. Moreover, there was talk about whether 'enhanced torture techniques' amounted to torture, but there have been strenuous denials over this and even if it were the case, stringent measures should be put in place to prevent it in the future, for if information had been obtained under torture, the desire to end the pain and speak could have led the Navy Seals in to a death trap. Torture is inherently unreliable. I do think that the pictures of the dead body should be released though because the fear of a propaganda coup for jihadists is overstated – they will carry out revenge raids regardless. Yet people of importance, not all favourable to Obama, have seen the pictures and I am prepared to accept their word (given that some would use any excuse to embarrass the President, yet they are not doing so).
The really worrying question is how bin Laden lived so close to Pakistan’s elite military academy without being detected. It could be that if you’re a small animal hiding from an elephant, the best place is under the trunk nose, but it has long been known that Pakistan’s intelligence services and army face both ways in terms of Islamist extremism. At least, Baron Frankenstein regretted his creation, yet Pakistan could still expire as a result of its experiments and power play. That a country, which is a ragbag of ethnicities where the higher-ups are politically delinquent, has nuclear weapons, is what should cause the whole world concern, rather then the elimination of a largely symbolic figure and the back story behind it.

Coleman's snooker balls

On the concluding day of the Snooker World Championship and on the day of a documentary regarding David Coleman, I'd just like to document Dennis Taylor doing a Coleman's Balls during an earlier commentary in the tournament. Purring over Mark Williams' technique, he cooed "Mark just floats the balls in. He's a floater." I'm sure Mark Williams was thrilled to be described as a buoyant turd in a toilet bowl that is recalcitrant to the flush, even if there was a slight click in Taylor's voice on the last syllable as he realised what he had just said.