Cameron is the biggest threat to the Union

Last week, the first shots were fired in the auldest battle - the battle for Scottish independence. With the SNP prevaricating over when it will hold its long promised referendum, David Cameron blundered in to tell Alex Salmond that Westminster would grant Holyrood the power to do so.  But the referendum would need to be held before 2013.  And, our English Prime Minister told the Scottish First Minister, he would prefer one question: Yes or No to independence.

This is an issue where there is quite a lot of process, much of it very legal and technical.  But it's clear enough that only the Westminster parliament can create and devolve the powers that would allow a referendum to happen.  But simply because that legal power resides in Westminster, doesn't mean that Westminster should dictate or excessively influence the timing and question put to the Scottish people. 

David Cameron's intervention was clumsy and cack-handed.  Cameron's refrain on the process is that Salmond is delaying the referendum for which he has spent his political life fighting, because he knows that if it were held any time soon he would lose it.  Support for outright independence is hovering around 35%.  But the reverse of Cameron's argument is also true, Cameron wants to have it now because he fears that Salmond might win it when the UK's Conservative led government - a party with minimal representation in Scotland of any kind - is desperately unpopular in 2014.

This focus on the process, and the impression Cameron has given of trying to fix the timing and question to be favourable to his Unionist stance, is itself a great threat to the Union.  Priority number one for the Unionist campaign must be to reverse (it's too late to avoid it now) any impression that England is fixing the referendum. 

Why?  Because this plays straight into Alex Salmond's hands.  When it comes to the substance of the debate, things like what currency Scotland will have (the euro as a new EU member state? Sounds unpopular), how much its public debt would be, the sustainability of its economy, its independent status in relation to armed forces and monarchy, are these the economic times to being going solo? On the real arguments, Salmond is much quieter.  Much better for him to play on emotions, on perceptions of English interference and dominance.

So Cameron should let go.  Have the discussions on process quietly and with a default position of letting the SNP take full responsibility for its timing and the question (including the option of "devolution plus" for which nearly 68% are thought to be supportive).  Don't let the SNP have any cause to rest their arguments on perceptions of unfairness.  Have the confidence to hold the referendum in 2014 and to unite across Unionist parties to make the arguments.  Let Scots lead the debate, Cameron and Osborne should take a back seat - let credible figures like Rifkind, Falconer, Darling, Kennedy, Campbell - even Gordon Brown - lead it.

He blundered in last week, but the PM is the biggest threat to the Union because of those tactics but also because he leads a distinctly English party.  The debate needs to be beyond parties, involving figures from outside politics completely.

It is a campaign that can be won - now and in 2014.  But the tactics must change.

Next year

OK - some rapid predictions for next year....

• Boris Johnson will win the London Mayoral elections, with a reduced majority
• Ed Miliband will survive another indifferent year as Leader of the Opposition
• Barack Obama will beat Mitt Romney in the US Presidential Elections
• Southampton will be promoted to the Premier League
• Francois Hollande will sneak the French Presidential elections
• Chris Huhne will resign from the Cabinet, to be replaced by David Laws
• William and Kate will announce that she is to have a baby
• President Assad will be forced from power in Syria
• England will be knocked out of Euro 2012 in the semi-finals
• Andy Murray will win a Grand Slam, but probably not Wimbledon
• Great Britain will win its biggest haul of medals in Olympic history
• Increased sanctions, but no attack, on Iran
• Imran Khan's star will rise in Pakistan, Zardari clings on for another year
• Unemployment in the UK will rise, borrowing will rise further, the UK will lose its AAA credit rating, and Ed Balls' alternative economic strategy will gradually gain momentum as voters tire of cuts, flatlining growth and growing unemployment

And, with that, a very Happy New Year.

The year of protest - a world changing but not changed

I was struck, reading the Economist's Christmas edition, just how dominated this year has been by protests.  The obvious wave of protest is the Arab Spring, where one man burning himself to death in Tunisia sparked uprisings in Egypt, Libya and those being bloodily resisted in Syria.  London was ablaze for one night in August, with police powerless to respond to the scale of mass public disorder.  The 'Occupy' movement camped outside St Paul's Cathedral, throwing the established Church into confusion as to how it should respond.  The eurozone crisis saw huge public protests in Greece and elsewhere against austerity measures.  In Russia, people seemed to be waking up to the fact that their post Soviet 'democracy' was in need of an overhaul.

Precisely what's going on deserves serious thought.  Are we just in bad times, economically broke and therefore miserable?  Is there a collective crisis of confidence in our leaders, that the scale of the challenges is greater than their ability to resolve them?  Or are we realising the potential of people power, recognising our own power to change the world around us?

But I guess we need to look too at what is actually changing.  Qadhafi has gone, yes.  Mubarak went, but has been replaced by military rule dragging its feet on reform.  Bin Laden was captured, but the war we're fighting stopped having anything to do with him a long way back.  The Occupy movement's empty tents remain outside St Paul's, but their demands are unclear and unlikely to be acted on.  The UK vetoed a European treaty, but it concerned a single currency we had never been part of.  London burned and we were appalled, but life goes on.    The eurozone was close to collapse many times, but came back from many brinks.  There is no doubt, however, that it remains in deep crisis.

Protest may be great, but I think what we really learn is that our world has been changing this year but is not changed.  The Middle East and North Africa, where the change has been most "dramatic", is the perfect example of this.  Apart from Tunisia, the so-called revolutions are works in progress, to be generous.  More negatively, the eurozone has been collapsing but has not yet collapsed - no eurozone member has yet had to leave.

Perhaps it's facile to try to quantify change.  Perhaps by its very nature it is hard to discern an endpoint, change is a process not an event.  But this year, and those preceding it, have seen unshakeable notions called into question - big global economies, big unmoveable autocrats.  The common denominator that has called all of these into question has been people power.   And perhaps it has always been this way, revolutions led by the people shaking our body politic into action.  From the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But the thing I will be watching most of all next year is how the path that the Middle East and North Africa takes in its journey of change.  We intervened in Libya to protect civilians, but stood aside whilst 5,000 Syrians perished and continue to perish in Assad's civil war.

Probably the biggest mistake that we could make in reviewing 2011 is to think that the job anywhere is done.  Or that it can't get any worse.  It might, and probably will, just about everywhere.

Time now for the power of votes in ballot boxes

My latest blog on Egypt was published over the weekend on Lib Dem Voice.

You can read the full post here  http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-egypt-time-now-for-the-power-of-votes-in-ballot-boxes-25989.html

The unfinished revolution

Over the weekend, the situation in Egypt has become ever more critical. The most sustained protests since President Mubarak was ousted in February. 13 people died and hundreds were injured in clashes between security forces and protesters, back in Tahrir Square.

The protesters are concerned that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egypt's interim government, is dragging its feet on elections and trying to cement its own position. This weekend's deaths seem certain to prolong the protests and lead to another occupation of Tahrir Square.

Before this, the military has put nearly 12,000 Egyptians in front of military tribunals, has been making policy on the hoof and is sticking to a plan to hold presidential elections a whole year from now. The military already stands accused of the deaths of 27 protesters in clashes with mostly Coptic Christians last month. Most prominently, bloggers and activists who the military have tried to silence through their tribunals have gone on hunger strikes. There are appalling stories of prisoner abuse in Egyptian jails, with one prisoner killed - allegedly tortured - after trying to smuggle a SIM card in.

Elections are due to take place next week. But the military hasn't yet confirmed any date for the transfer of power to civilians. Until they do, the elections will be unempowered. There is a political vaccum, and some analysts suggest the only choice is between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army.

Inevitably, the UK's Arab Spring focus has been on Libya. It's a hard balance for Western countries to encourage indigenous revolution rather than be seen to dictate ourselves. But we should surely be making it clear to Egypt's military rulers that they need to reassure Egyptians that they are there only on an interim basis, that civilian rule will follow swiftly, and to reject autocratic military tribunals that are bringing Egyptians onto the streets again. Perhaps the best hope is for Egypt's neighbour Tunisia to keep influencing change in Egypt. Tunisia's elections were swift, peaceful and effective. Egyptians deserve the same.

Targets... good or bad?

There was a quiet U-turn of sorts this week when Andrew Lansley decided to reintroduce targets to control hospital waiting times.  Why?  Because it turns out that more NHS patients are waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment since the government scrapped targets in May last year.

Of the patients treated in September 2011, almost 18,000 more had to wait longer for treatment than in May last year.  In neurosurgery, there was an increase of 66% in patients who had to wait more than 18 weeks.

This raises interesting questions for a liberal blog, whose default position should be less central control, give power and responsibility to the doctors and nurses closest to the patients. 

In fact, Andrew Lansley has had to say that the Department for Health will now begin monitoring the numbers of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks.

You might draw the conclusion, as Labour is doing, that if you scrap the central targets then the quality of service goes down.  That their "top-down" approach, vilified by Tories and Lib Dems at the last election, does actually work.

For me, it sums up that you need to look beyond the rhetoric of "top-down versus bottom-up".  You can have a health service which delegates authority, responsibility and innovation to the lowest tier and still maintain central targets of an acceptable service.

Any business (public or private) delivering a service needs to measure itself against certain standards.  Setting those targets isn't a straitjacket that hinders innovation, since hospitals can always exceed the target or be named and shamed if they miss the target, just as a private business would be if it performed less well compared with its competitors.

I began reading Sir Michael Barber's book (he was Head of Tony Blair's "Delivery Unit") on what he calls "deliverology", what others call "top down targets".  It was hardgoing, but it convinced me that its central approach was a sensible one.  It's based firmly on the idea of reducing the layers of bureaucracy or chain of delivery between politicians saying what the service should look like and hospitals or schools delivering that service.

The coalition like Sir Michael's ideas enough to have exported him to try and sort out Pakistan's education system, something we're pumping tons of DFID money into.

And it seems to be wholly possible to have central targets, as long as there is freedom for service providers to have control of their own budgets and ideas to deliver that service as they see fit.  That's the important part of the "bottom-up" approach that we really need to get cracking with.

Direct democracy meets whips' clunking fist

Again, I'm coming to events pretty late after a long time out of blogging whilst I completed my notice from the civil service. I hope to begin blogging under my real name (and perhaps to a real audience, not just to myself) in the next few weeks in a re-launched format.

I'm just reflecting again how the Government might have handled the EU referendum issue better at the Commons vote a few weeks ago. There's no doubt that the timing was pretty odd, held as the eurozone was crumbling. But, I also feel strongly that the Lib Dems in particular were in entirely the wrong place on the issue and were sending out some pretty confusing signals.

First, this was a non-binding vote. So if MPs had voted to have a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, there wouldn't necessarily have been a referendum. It would have signalled what MPs thought, so it was heavy handed and unnecessary for the Coalition to force MPs to vote against it.

Second, this vote happened because more than 100,000 members of the public signed a petition for Parliament to debate the issue. The first time this has happened under a wheeze ostensibly designed to bring citizen and state together, and petitions - we're told -  are "a good thing". They will "make a difference".  They will chip away at the "old, discredited politics".  The petitions system is a form of direct democracy, beyond the 5 year lock-in a party's manifesto, where the public can (supposedly) shape and refine the Government's programme.

Let's be frank, the Lib Dems were nowhere in this argument. Yes, because the media turned the clock back to 1992 and enjoyed a Tory "rebellion" over Europe. But for a party which tore itself up over the Lisbon Treaty vote, where - back in 2007 - Nick Clegg ordered his MPs to abstain because they wanted not a referendum on Lisbon but on "in or out"... to be voting against an "in or out" referendum this time seemed bizarre to anyone who bothers to track how a party feels about an issue like Europe.

On Europe, the Lib Dems are looking illiberal and undemocratic, afraid of putting the positive case for Europe that they surely believe in to the public. You can't argue the toss over AV or PR on the grounds of fairness, if you want to deny a vote on Europe because you don't trust the public to make the right decision. Or is it that they, we, don't have the confidence to put the arguments across.

The excuse this time for ducking a referendum was that the Lib Dem manifesto promised a referendum only in the event of future treaty changes. I guess that's what the small print says, and it's what will happen if there are future treaty changes (both parties support it).   . 

But on a non-binding motion responding to a free public petition, it's a shame that the Government responded by whipping MPs to the party line.   And we don't just elect Members of Parliament to solidly defend their parties' manifesto.  Yes, the winning candidate for the winning party is elected to gather sufficient MPs in Parliament to win a mandate to deliver the most popular manifesto.  But we also elect our MPs on the basis of other things they say, who they are, what they stand for and because we put trust in their judgement to act on our behalf.  And now, so we thought, through petitioning we have a direct way of influencing their judgement beyond the electoral cycle.

What the Government (one we are told is "liberal" Conservative and "Liberal" Democrat) was effectively saying was, "thanks for your views submitted to our new grand, democratic scheme; but, actually, we don't care what you think... it's what our 2010 manifestos said ,that you may or may not have voted on, that counts". And, they said, it's more important for our MPs to be loyal to the whips, not think for themselves.

After this, why bother petitioning?  Reasonable or unreasonable (there's plenty of Clarkson for PM petitions out there) - if we continue this way, the most likely outcome is to be ignored.