Now many of us cynical lefties thought this was all a ploy, words (crucially not really backed up with actual policies) by an opportunistic opposition doing whatever it took to try and win power. That Cameron was no Macmillan/Heath style one nation Tory but a Thatcherite wolf trying to wear a different coat.

My blog last week was about how the CSR proves that all of these suspicions were correct, that the Tories were in fact a hard right, uber Thatcherite party resorting to type with their fiscal policies. This time I would like to focus on one specific area where the Government is getting things badly wrong in my opinion.

Demonstration of the Coalitions model new "Affordable Home"

I guess housing is one area that can affect our lives more than pretty much anything on a day to day basis we all need somewhere to live. And given we live on a verdant (read “rains all the time”) island we are always going to spend a fair proportion of our time at home. And for most of us housing represents a massive proportion of our spending, particularly for young people.

That there is something of a crisis in housing, particularly affordable housing, is pretty uncontroversial in all political circles, what to do about this is something somewhat more open to debate.

Now, and I promise I am not making this up, the Government’s position seems to be that the essential problem in respect of affordable housing is that…. It is too affordable! Our deputy PM “Cleggsy Bear” is at pains to point out that if we increase the cost of social housing to “near market rate” then more social housing will be built… well d’uh! Doesn’t solve the problem that by drastically increasing the cost of affordable social housing it won’t be very social, or affordable.

I guess this comes to the crux of the problem. I argued in my last blog that a big part of the problems we were facing financially was due to the failure of light touch regulation, small state trust the market solutions; and how the Tory answer was “more of the same please”… This was true of finance and banking, and it is true of housing.

I have no doubt that the “right to buy” was great for all the people who benefitted from it; further I do wonder if the “left” has any real right to say that people shouldn’t aspire to own their own homes. On that basis I do not have an in principle objection to the right to buy.

However I have to say the decision to not allow Councils to replace the housing stock they sold off has been catastrophic in its effect on communities, the housing market in general and particularly the young. The price inflation caused by this fed into the over heating of the housing market; which as well as making the aspiration to own a home increasingly out of the reach of more and more young people, also contributed in a massive part to the banking problems that caused the recession.

Further the boom in “buy to let” investments has further over cooked the Market and made things more and more difficult. What we have seen is a catastrophic failure of the market to deliver what people need (affordable good quality housing) in favour of what the few “want” (loadsa money!). It seems to me to be astonishing that anyone could reach the conclusion that “more of the same” will somehow result in the situation improving magically.

Even more astonishing is that the Government seem to not understand some basic principles of the Market…. It is “supply and demand” folks. So what do we think private landlords are going to do if the price of social housing in their areas suddenly and drastically increases eh? Do we think they will act in a socially responsible way of leaving things the same for the collective good? Really, anyone think that?

Of course not, if all the council and housing association rents go up then so will the price of private rents, and by extension the value of housing and the cost of mortgages. This might represent something good for those who are already “on the boat” and own their homes (and possibly second ones) but for the poorest, and the most vulnerable in society (oh and by the way Cleggsy Bear not all poor people qualify for Housing Benefit) the housing apartheid will increase even more.

Now the worst thing is that at the same time as the government are proposing to remove the one factor that has been acting as something of a brake on rising unaffordability in the housing market they are also proposing to drastically cut housing benefit levels. So raise the prices, and cut the benefit sounds like a nice progressive policy to me.

The trouble is this will in many ways completely price poor people out of many areas. Higher rents, with cut housing benefits could lead to a massive exodus. Now I am not sure what the equivalent term for “Ethnic Cleansing” (mind you given income distributions in the UK amoung different ethnicities this very well could  amount to actual ethnic cleansing in some areas) for this would be “Poverty cleansing” I suppose. Now of course the Tories do have form on this. Dame Shirley Porter was embroiled in a homes for votes scandal twenty years ago, shows that things don’t change.

If I was cynical, and wishing to continue in my polemic tone of my last blog, I might wonder if Cameron as his wealthy chums wanted to ghettoise the poor away from him and his ilk so they wouldn’t have to witness the ill effects of their cuts first hand. But as I am a progressive left wing blogger, for whom it would be churlish to point out that millionaire cabinet members will never need to worry about paying the rent due to the big old inheritances they are scheduled to receive, I shall refrain from any more incendiary “class warfare” style comments!

But the bottom line is that what they are proposing is fundamentally unfair and wrong. It leaves the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer (is that the Conservative party motto?). Clegg was roundly ridiculed for his attack on the IFS about their view on fairness (I think the ConDems wish to rebrand inequity as fairness), and this kind of a policy shows why. If the ConDem coalition finally nails the coffin in affordable housing it should finally put to bed any doubts about who these people are.

So Tory brand de-toxified? Is it hell….

Meet the new Tories, same as the Old Tories.

And here is what we now know beyond all reasonable doubt, this is a regressive budget, it effects the poor more than the rich, the sick more than the able bodied, the weak more than the strong, women more than men. We are most certainly not “in this together”.

When the Financial Times and the IFS (The “Institute for Fiscal Studies” previously beloved of the Tories) agree that this is a regressive budget that effects the poor more we know this isn’t just an instinctive knee jerk by the left. Something really is up, this really is unfair and wrong.

What we are seeing is the Tories engaging in opportunistic “disaster capitalism” to try and as the Daily Mail is smugly proclaiming today; to Roll Back the State. This is an ideological attack on the very idea of the State being an actor trying to deliver a fairer and better world.

I really don’t want to sound like a shrill lefty, bleating on in language that suggests class war, but it is hard not to when the Tories are engaging in “class war with a calculator” (as the comedian Mark Thomas so brilliantly put it).

Seeing as I have started in that vein I ought to finish! The thing is these people doing this are not people who have any comprehension of the effects of what they are doing. Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Huhne et al are not “normal people” from “normal backgrounds”. They are wealthy and privileged. People with public school educations, multi million pound trust funds, and the dodgy handshakes which mean none of them will ever be unemployed or in serious financial trouble.

These are people who don’t have to send their kids to the local state school because they can send them to Eton or Westminster. They don’t have to rely on the NHS because they can afford to go private. They are not that worried about “bobbies on the beat” because they don’t live in places where they might get mugged on the street by a crack addict.

In this sense it is no wonder they don’t like the idea of the state intervening to try and make our society fairer and better. They don’t believe in “equality of opportunity” because they benefit personally, and collectively as a group/class from the current inequity. Their life chances, and those of their ilk are enhanced by the maintenance of the status quo.

For the right state intervention to try and decrease inequity is in principle wrong, it represents the dreaded (to them) “Social engineering” and they have longed for decades to be able to reduce the role of the state as a “actor” in our society. The truth is Tories don’t believe in fairness; they see it as unnatural and undesirable.

But we know what happens in Lassiez Faire economies and political systems. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Our societies become divided, and things get worse for all of us. The reason why the welfare state was created during the 20^th Century was as a reaction against the kind of small, unequal, unfair, non interventionist state the Tories and their Lib Dem lackies are now espousing.

The great irony in all this is the opportunity for them to perform this awful attack on the state is the financial crisis. Let’s remember that this crisis was not (as the ConDems keep claiming) caused by a bloated or inflated state (prior to the crash UK spending as a proportion of GDP was within normal levels) but by a financial catastrophe caused by deregulated markets. It was precisely the sort of small state, light touch, trust the market government that put us all in this mess and the Tory solution is “more of the same please”.

This is an attack on the poor, the weak, the sick, the old, the young. But most of all it is an attack on the very idea of fairness, of equality, of fair life chances. And more than anything this has to give the left a common purpose of unity to fight what is happening. We cannot allow the Tories to get away with couching what they are doing in the language of fairness; it needs to be ruthlessly exposed for what it is.

We are not all in this together. And we should all remember the sight of braying, millionaire Tory MPs cheering at devestating cuts that will destroy livelehoods, families and cummunities. Hold that thought and image; and remember it at the next election.

1. First up would be the state of the Labour Party finances. At the 2010 general election Labour were in a large part hamstrung by the state of their finances. There was simply no ability to compete with the millions poured into the general election campaign by Lord Ashcroft.

   Subsequent to the general election Labour’s financial position is even worse, there is no realistic possibility of Labour at this juncture being able to finance a rigorous general election campaign; this leaves the somewhat unsettling possibility of short-term timing actually benefiting the Tories rather than the left.

   There is little value in bringing down the government if we do not have some sort of confidence that it will bring forward a better one. If the left is completely unable to fight a general election and have prospects of victory because we simply do not have the money; then the time is not right to force the end of the coalition.

2. Next the Labour Party has not yet had sufficient internal debate about the reasons why we lost, the election, the battle of ideas and its activist base. I have previously blogged about how I definitely felt the Labour party have lost its way, I found it more difficult to vote Labour at the 2010 general election than I ever have done before.

   On a range of issues, from the Iraq war, to Civil Liberties, taxation policy, the Private Finance initiative, trade union legislation and how the party deals with internal democracy.

   Until such a time as the Labour Party has elected a new leader, and had its important internal philosophical discussions about what kind of party it wishes to be; then I think it is very unlikely that the Labour Party will be in a position to win a general election.

   After 1997 the Tories spent a long long time believing all they needed was one big push of more of the same to come back into power. The Labour Party has to learn the lessons of this, for the left to win we need to understand the reasons why we lost, we need to understand how we can start winning again, we need to regain a sense of the mission and purpose in the values of the party and the movement. I don’t believe the Labour Party is yet in that place.

3. Now we move on to the issue of cuts, the economy and the budget deficit. I think it’s quite easy to the left at this juncture to engage in some collective amnesia, to either forget, or pretend to the contrary, that the Labour Party had every intention of making cuts had they won a fourth term of office.

   We have to be absolutely clear that the balance of how the deficit would have been arrested within very different under a Labour government. The pace at which this happens, the balance between increased taxation and cutting spending, and where increased taxation will fall and on what gets cut, would all have been very different.
   
   

   But despite all of that cuts would have been coming. The wider left, trade unionists et al, would no doubt have been very unhappy at many of the fiscal policies that a fourth term Labour government would have engaged in. It would have absolutely been better if this had happened, no matter how unpopular this made the party, because we would not have the almost class warfare the coalition has waged on the poor.
   
   But given that the last election was lost a silver lining surely has to be the way in which right will be tarnished and tainted by the fact that it is they who have been carrying out the cuts.
   
   Further if, as is seeming increasingly likely; bad economic calls by the Tories push us into a double dip recession, or a least a slower and more sluggish recovery. Then this has to help the left as and when a general election comes naturally.
   
   

4. Lastly, and most importantly the polls. The reality is that at the moment the poll information does nothing to suggest that the Labour Party are likely to be able to imminently win a general election. In fact looking than most of the polls the likelihood is that quick an early general election would probably result in a Conservative majority.
   
   Things are close, and I am not Nostradamus, and we all remember from 1992 how badly wrong in the polls can get it. But is it generally received wisdom that the opposition need to have a healthy poll lead going into a general election. As the left does not have this I think this is the strongest argument for why the coalition hanging together, at least for the time being, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
   
   

Almost certainly a degree of clutching at straws here from me, I don’t want the ConDemNation in power, I really wish that they would go away and us have something better in place. Every time it looks like there is going to be a close division, where the government might lose an embarrassing vote, I am obviously going to be cheering for that to happen. All the same it does in hurt to think with your head and not your heart about these things.

Much of this debate focussed on the need to attack the coalition to try and bring it down as quickly as possible. Now I cant say that this would be anything other than a hot damn good thang! But I feel the need to write a couple of quick blogs about firstly how likely I think this is later how desirable it would be right now….

So first of all a “few reasons why I think the coalition will last”.

1. The Liberal Democrats simply cannot afford to be in a general election any time soon. With poll rating around 13-15% at the moment the Liberals could face being wiped out if an election was called in the near future. Whatever the morals, ethics or conscience of a particular vote bringing down the government at the moment would likely put many Liberal Democrat MPs out of a job.

   Now Turkeys may sometimes vote for Christmas, and I have no doubt there are a fair few MPs who would happily give up their jobs for a principle…. but I for one would not bet on enough of them doing that to topple the government any time soon.

   Much more likely if you ask me is that having taken the hit in terms of public opinion for the negative impressions of the coalition the Liberals are tied into hoping that their popularity increases if and when the economy starts an upturn.

2. This coalition is a once in a generation opportunity to try and get electoral reform. Nick Clegg recently claimed that electoral reform is not the be all and end all of Lib Dem policy, but the reality is it always will be due to the way First Past the post punishes third parties. For the Lib Dems (and for that matter and aspiring new party) changing the voting system is vital to them having any real prospects of influence.

   So it is of vital importance that the Liberals keep the coalition together to deliver a referendum on AV. If they pass up the opportunity to try and fight a referendum on this they might as well pack up their bags and go home.

   Combined with low ratings in the polls, if the Liberals cannot make the coalition delivery electoral reform, then they risk becoming a marginalised irrelevance for 20 years or so. I don’t think there is any realistic possibility of them taking this risk.

3. The Liberal Democrats need to be able to demonstrate that coalitions can work. As far as I can see there are very few people outside of the most tribal and blinkered Labour and Tory diehards who do not at least acknowledge that FPTP is unfair. But despite this many people have objections to the adoption of electoral reform on other grounds.

   One of the principal of such objections is the fear that coalition government is inherently unstable, weak and indecisive. People look at countries (usually those who operate straight party lists systems like Israel, Belgium or pre 90s reform Italy) and feel that coalition governments are necessarily flakey and prone to dissolving at the first sign of trouble.

   Again the Liberals have a once in a generation opportunity to try and change perspectives on this. Even if they suffer in the short term by making this coalition work, and last, they have the potential prize of demonstrating that a hung parliament is not a bad thing and can work. This, in the long term, is central to their chances of being an influential and successful political party in Britain over the long haul.

4. Next it is clearly suiting David Cameron having the Liberals forming something of a bulwark against the hard right within his own party, at least in the short term. A big risk of Cameron was always that the extreme of the party would be very unhappy with his urbane “Notting Hill set” style of leadership and political instincts.

   Being in a coalition allows him to be able to blame any such policies on the Liberals and the coalition even if he privately supports them and would have tried to do it even if the Tories had won the election outright.

5. The Liberal Democrats are providing a handy pressure valve for the Tories. It seems that the majority of the backlash, and negative feelings toward the Government are being held toward the Libs. They are being blamed for the bad stuff, and the left is focussing most of it’s ire on them (wrongly in my opinion).

   Insofar as this continues the smart tactic for the Tories is to maintain the coalition and hope that if things improve in the run up to the next election, then it will be them and not their coalition partners that ream the reward.

I have long thought for these reasons it is fundamentally wrong headed to assume that it is going to be easy to bring down the government. I find it hard to imagine a situation in which an early election is going to be good for the Libs, and it can’t see the Tories wanting an election unless it starts to look like a shoe in that they are going to win the next election.

So anyway that is part one, next blog about why I am not even sure it is desirable, right at this moment, to bring down the coalition.

For my money the Liberal Democrats really didn’t have too much choice after the election given the mathematics of the parliament. There really wasn’t a credible possibility of a workable Lib/Lab coalition and for the Liberals they only really had an option of a coalition with the Tories.

I don’t think there is any particular need for the left to focus it’s attentions on the Liberal Democrats. Simply by getting into bed with the Tories they have caused themselves terrible problems at future elections. We won’t need to work hard on attacking the Liberals to pick up the votes of disillusioned left leaning Lid Dem voters. That is going in part to happen as a matter of course as the pain of the Government cuts starts to bite.

Labour can also achieve far more on this front by stopping being so profoundly illiberal on civil liberties; and no longer following such a hawkish, US aligned foreign policy. Addressing the reason why so many progressive people abandoned the Labour party will do more to attract new activists and voters than attacking the Lib Dems.

The truth is that the enemy are the Tories, they are the ideological drivers for the savage cuts, the Tories are the people who have an in principal, belief led, commitment to the idea of the maintenance of an unequal and unfair society. The Tories are the people the left need to be focussing our ire and energies on.

Labour, Unions and the wider Left cannot afford to let the Tories off the hook for what they are doing, and focussing on the distraction that is the alleged “betrayal” by the Liberal Democrats is meaning the left is wasting valuable time and energy.

Lastly the other thing we cannot ignore is that it is quite possible that there could be another hung parliament after the next election. These are unusual times, and if the Arithmetic is stacked slightly differently next time, a Labour win the most seats and the biggest share of the vote but not a majority we may well need to form some sort of a pact with the Liberal Democrats.

So lets forget Clegg, Cable et al, and start using our gun powder on the real bad guys. The PM, Michael Gove, Lord Ashcroft and most of all George Osborne.

So I was delighted when the Labour promised to back AV in the manifesto. And whilst I was devastated to see the Tories back in power a small crumb of comfort for me was that part of the coalition agreement would deliver a referendum on electoral reform that I hoped would make our politics better.

AV ballot paper

I also support, in principle, the idea of equal sized constituencies. It is clearly inarguable that in a democracy this is a desirable, and necessary thing. It has long been a tenet of progressive and left wing politics, dating back to the chartists, that we should have equal sized constituencies.

But the problem for me is the basis on which the Condems are trying to introduce the equal sized constituencies; namely that of the existing electoral roll. The problem with this is that there are millions of eligible voters not currently on the electoral register.

People not on the electoral register are disproportionately the poor, the young and those form ethnic minorities. It will be fundamentally and in principal wrong to draw new constituencies without first making real efforts to get these people onto the roll.

Or better still if we are going to move to equal size constituencies lets base them on numbers of people eligible to register to vote. This would be fairer, and more democratic, and it would also make it impossible for the wreckers in both Labour and the Tory parties to oppose constitutional reform.

The Tories have obviously set Labour a trap here and it is necessary to act wisely and cautiously. By tying the AV referendum (something that is a Labour manifesto pledge) to boundary reform that Labour can never accept they are putting Labour into a difficult position.

For me the sensible course of action would be to make it clear that Labour will offer full support to the bill on the proviso that the basis of equal sized constituencies is changed to those eligible to register. This would put the ball back in the Governments court and it would be them, rather than us who seem unreasonable.

So in short Yes to AV, Yes to equal constituencies, no to the dishonest way the government are basing the boundary reviews.

Not the economic class warfare on the poor that the con-dems are engaging in, nor the attempt to deconstruct universal education, nor for that matter most of their public policy agenda. But where they do seem to have stolen a march is in terms of the Liberty agenda.

I agree whole heartedly with Diane Abbott when she wonders, in exasperation, how we ever let the Tories be to the left of us on civil liberties.

Prison

So therefore I had mixed emotions last week when listening to Ken Clarke’s speech about penal policy. These emotions were mixed because I found myself agreeing with most of what he had to say, and then tearing my hair out at Jack Straws response.

Basically Clarke made a break away from the Michael Howard “Prison Works” dogma which has driven penal and criminal justice policy in the UK since the early 90s. Clarke noted that the current levels of incarceration in prison today would have seemed unbelievable in the early 90s, and further that most European countries have proportionately lower prison populations and lower crime.

I doubt that the Tories have undergone any particular Damascene conversion to a more thoughtful and progressive policy of Criminal Justice. I rather suspect that when Clark lambasted Labour for “Conducting policy with a chequebook in one hand and the Daily Mail in the other” the emphasis was very much on the former.

Despite this, the policy here offers a real prospect of a public policy change for the better. Labour have been locked into a destructive arms race that we can *never* win on Criminal Justice. It does not matter what we do, how hard, how illiberal, how shrill we are it will never satisfy the Mail, the Express or Disgusted form Tonbridge Wells.

Instead we now have an opportunity to argue for a more sensible and evidence Criminal Justice Policy. One that recognises that the causes of crime are varied, and that being “tough on the causes” of crime does not mean just banging more people up.

Maybe we can argue for a more sensible drugs policy? Or at the very least properly funded treatment for addicts. Perhaps we could be looking at things like restorative justice, which has been shown to have a significant impact on the recidivism of offenders.

But mostly this con-dem switch will allow us to maybe position ourselves on the side of the Angels again. The Labour Party could just try to score some cheap political points in the face of this as Jack Straw has tried to do. If we do this we are missing one of the tricks in respect of why Labour lost the election.

It would be better, and more progressive if we tried to be positive and dream of a good society. One in which we do not have the highest prison population in Europe, and in which we look to genuinely reduce crime, rather than just react to it.