It was the Press wot’ done it

Last night, as Simon Hughes and Vince Cable finished their announcement to the press on the doorsteps of the Liberal Democrats Cowley Street headquarters, a voice from amongst the serried ranks of journalists cried out “Who wielded the dagger?” For the answer to that question, the press might be better looking closer to home.

Sir Menzies Campbell has been dogged by a hostile press since his election to lead the party just 18 months ago. He had had an inauspicious start: the Conservatives had just elected their new leader only weeks before the Lib Dems only leadership crisis, in a competition that at the time was seen as very good for the Tories; the nature of Charles Kennedy’s departure left a bitter taste in the mouths of many voters and party activists (though not as bitter as the gin that was his downfall); and Ming’s early performances at Prime Minister’s Questions were not great.

Yet the story was far from simple. Within months of being elected leader, the Lib Dems scored to a brilliant by-election result in Bromley & Chislehurst: just 650 more votes and the future of both Sir Menzies and the Liberal Democrats might have been very different. The story at PMQs was far from one-sided and by all accounts he had been getting better. And his conference speech in Brighton last month was the best of his career.

And therein lies the truth of his demise. For all that success, the press were simply not interested. It was as if they did not want to hear that Sir Menzies, at 66 years of age, leading a Liberal Democratic Party, might actually have good, important points to make that the British people might want to hear. I thought it was an excellent speech, and so did many of my colleagues. But it had precisely no impact upon the media whatsoever.

For the press, the story had already been written: Ming was too old; the Young Turks were waiting in the wing’s; the Lib Dems were being squeezed (media-speak for our policies being stolen by the other parties); and if we did not dump our leaders soon we would crash to a defeat that would be worse than anything since the SDP merged with the Liberals in 1988. Forget the fact that in both this Summer’s parliamentary by-elections we came second and pushed “David Cameron’s Conservatives” into third place; or the fact that in the previous 15 council by-elections, we gained two seats and the Tories lost one, while Labour merely held their ground; or the fact that in my recent Council election, for example, we polled more votes than Labour and the Conservatives combined. For the press, the story was already written, because they had written it.

Now, the hypocrisy is in full swing. The media are variously saying that Sir Menzies was a nice chap but just overwhelmed by the negative press he’d received (from whom?); that he was getting better at his job but that the public were not listening (because the media weren’t conveying the message); and that he was assassinated (which, if true, may have been because every MP at every interview was asked when Ming would go).

If this dark episode has any silver lining, it is that the Lib Dems can look forward to some heightened media attention as Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne battle it out for the leadership (with, presumably, some others in the sidelines). However, it is unlikely that – when the dust settles – the press are going to be willing to give us the continuing coverage that we deserve, as a party that received a quarter of the votes in the last general election. Our future, with or without Sir Menzies, will be a tough battle in the face of a hostile media. Time to start writing those Focuses.

Tell it how it is!

The UNICEF report into child well-being has acted as a lightning conductor for opinion across the political spectrum.

It has also generated headlines that in this one issue say so much about the various newspapers and their editorial stance. A comparison made me smile. If I’d not matched them up, I’m sure you’d have had no trouble guessing!

Independent: Our national disease is lack of parental time Independent: If we want to help children, the state has to step in. But will ministers dare advocate this?

Times: Blind feminism has hurt our children

Guardian: Give our children more respect, urge campaigners

Daily Mail: Blame game amid Britain’s child scandal
Daily Mail: The sick family of Europe

Telegraph: Children need stability and boundaries more than money

Express: When childhood really was tough

Too much freedom and accountability

Credit where credit’s due, the Labour Government has done some very good things since it was elected. Sadly, most of those were in its first term, and the best was within its first week. I genuinely believe that had Gordon Brown resigned after one week in office, having handed control of interest rates to the Bank of England on his sixth day, he would forever be known as the greatest Chancellor Britain has ever had. Instead, he will be known as the man who wrecked the public finances and raised taxes to their highest level in a quarter of a century.

Another of those great innovations were the Freedom of Information Act. It is a commonplace of democratic societies that for the citizens to hold the executive to account, information must be available for them to examine. The legislature has had this right for a long time through parliamentary questions (usually written and rarely the stage-managed Whitehall farce that is Prime Ministers’ Questions). All governments curb this right with qualifications – one can hardly expect MI5 to reveal what’s in its filing cabinets – but the general principle is that information is available unless it meets a specific exemption category.

One thing that should not affect this right is whether the executive believes that the enquiry is a good use of public time and money. It is implicit in the fact of the Act that it is a priori in the public’s interest that the time and money is made available to providing the information, because the public’s interest is served by the executive knowing that its records can be scrutinised.

But one can have too much of a good thing; the public interest can be served too well. How is a government to function when pesky journalists and politicians keep digging up the dirt hiding in their files? Occasional requests by people affected by a particular policy may be tolerable, but these researchers and campaigners who are a constant thorn in the side of government need to be curbed. After all, the government knows best; that has always been part of the Labour mantra – at least, when they are in government; when they are out of government that is because it has been captured by special interests, or the voters have succumbed to lies or selfishness or ‘just don’t get it’.

So to its eternal discredit (and this government has been eternally discredited by many of its policies over the years) it has announced today plans to curb its own Freedom of Information Act. It is looking to include officials’ time in the calculation of the cost of responding to a request, which will mean that many more requests – and particularly the complicated ones that journalists submit – breach the £600 limit over which requests may be turned down. If one involves enough officials or pays them a high enough salary, almost any request could be shot down in this way. Another suggestion is that ‘serial requesters’ (the FoI equivalent of nuisance callers) should be limited to only a certain number of requests over a certain period. So, for example, repeat offenders with nothing better to do than harass hard-working government departments such as, oh, say the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Guardian or a political party, will only be able to put in a limited number of requests a year (and yes, the do intend to lump organisations together, rather than count each journalist individually).

In truth, this is evidence of the yawning gap between the high principles that Labour espoused ten years ago and the sordid reality of a decade of power. No longer are they scalded by opposition and keen on open government; now they are burnt by sleaze and scandal and keen to be able to hide behind the veils of Whitehall. Freedom of information is not just any law, like licensing hours or the speed limit, that can be debated and amended every few years by parliament to reflect the will of society. Freedom of Information is a fundamental liberty, without which we cannot hold our executive to account. And as with all infringements of liberty, one has to ask what the tyrant is trying to achieve; or in this case, what are they trying to hide?

Iraq, the media and the war on terror

Matthew d’Ancona, editor of the Spectator, gave a speech yesterday at Policy Exchange at which he launched a pamphlet entitled Confessions of a Hawkish Hack – the media and the war on terror. He was also interviewed by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright. In what was a generally thoughtful and at times pessimistic discussion, perhaps the most interesting feature was that both the right-wing Mr. d’Ancona and the left-wing Mr. Bright admitted that that they might yet be proved wrong regarding their positions (respectively pro- and anti-) on the “War on Terror” and the Iraq War.

Those of you who now dismiss everything that supporters of the war have to say as though their every utterance is forever tainted should look away now, for this discussion is not for you. It is about you, however, for one of Mr. d’Ancona’s main themes was that one tragedy of the Iraq War is that it has undermined –perhaps destroyed – our society’s ability to engage in much-needed debate about the war between Islamic fundamentalism and Western values.

Mr. d’Ancona’s argued that Tony Blair’s decision to publish the Iraq Dossier both confused intelligence (the art of assessment, interpretation and educated guesswork) with spin (the art of presenting maybes as definites) and made the justification of the war rest on the existence of WMD, rather than Saddam Hussein’s violation of 12 years of Security Council resolutions. “Iraq” had now become shorthand for everything that is wrong with the New Labour project, and for its ultimate failure.

The result was that the much more important debate about how we confront Islamists bent on establishing a global Caliphate (an attitude that some American’s have taken to describing, quite accurately, as “Islamo-fascism”) is now framed in simplistic terms that paint everything as black and white and uses one single battle as a yardstick for the wider debate.

The question one is asked as a matter of course is “Where did you stand on Iraq?”, and how one answers is taken as indicative of where one stands on everything else, and whether one’s judgement is worthy of consideration. Mr. d’Ancona did not use the simile, but it would be like judging one’s position on the liberation of Europe by asking whether one supported the Battle of Arnhem.

Mr. d’Ancona’s fear is that we may be losing a war that many of us refuse to accept exists. While he recognises that “War on Terror” is a vague and unsatisfactory term, he questions what alternative President Bush could have used after 9/11: to name Islam even in context would have stoked the crusade fallacy Bin Laden would have us believe; to refer to it as merely a crime would not have satisfied the horror felt around the world. The enemy certainly views it as a war, and its plans span generations.

“This is the cold sweat war” in which the terrorist first spreads fear and then discord; we fight amongst ourselves, both between and within democracies. Meanwhile governments face the pressure to appear constantly new, constantly interesting, so that priorities become lost in “the quest for the daily mandate”. Governments have become subject to a form of ADHD, constantly flitting from one policy area to the next, frantically legislating and politicking, and journalists are party to it; they demand hyperactivity because it feeds their thirst for rolling-news.

The West is suffering from its own consumer culture (there d’Ancona would agree with both the domestic left and the Islamic far-right). If we don’t like a product we take it back and throw it away. This is liberating where MP3 players and mobile phones are concerned. With political parties it is harmful, and in foreign policy it is disastrous. Politics in general and foreign affairs in particular require strategic thinking; a sense of what we want at the finish and how we will get there. The key to strategy is that we stick to it even when faced with tactical setbacks; Tobruk didn’t make us abandon the North Africa Campaign.

Too many in the West now think that once the “Two madmen” that led us into Iraq have left office we will be able to put the sordid chapter of their folie à deux behind us and return to the norm of peace. This is wrong. “Modern conflicts are not trials of strength but of will”. This war, with a strain of Islam that teaches that the West is decadent and must be overthrown and which trains our own citizens to be its foot-soldiers, will grind on long after Blair and Bush are gone. The question is, do we have the patience we need to save our civilisation?