Phil Taylor

It seems that Ealing council leader, Labour’s Julian Bell, is in favour of our 19th century system of household voter registration. The UK is the only Western democracy that does not have individual electoral registration (IER). He is not alone. Labour figures Harriet Harman and Tom Watson have also come out in favour of the existing system which many suspect allows men, especially men in ethnic communities, to control the votes of their entire households.

The UK’s independent Electoral Commission has been advocating IER since 2003. The previous Labour government initiated moves to IER and the current government is carefully moving this project forward. Belatedly the Left has realised that this may lose them some votes, see the New Statesman here.

All of a sudden Hattie and Co. are in favour of men’s right to vote on behalf of their entire household. Harriet Harman’s remarks are typically partisan and unhelpful. She said in closing last week’s Labour conference:

And the Lib Dems – to their eternal shame – are colluding with the Tories in changing the law on the electoral register. The plans the Tories have set out are going to push people off the electoral register – deny them their vote, deny them their voice. The numbers are going to be huge. The independent Electoral Commission warn that this could deny millions of people the right to vote. The Tories hope it will help them win the election. That is a shameful assault on people’s democratic rights and we will expose it and campaign against it. Parliament has no right to take away people’s right to vote. The government cannot be allowed to get away with it.

You would get no idea from these remarks that IER is entirely uncontroversial. If you spend any time reading the White Paper the current proposals are merely a speeding up of proposals made by the previous Labour government and endorsed by the independent Electoral Commission. Indeed the Electoral Commission issued the following statement to effectively rebut Harriet Harman the same day she spoke:

We support the introduction of IER as an important improvement in how people register to vote. It was initially proposed by the previous government and we are pleased that the current government has produced a White Paper on its introduction. We welcome the current debate on the issue and the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny to ensure IER is introduced in the best way possible.

We believe IER can be introduced in a way to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register is improved. We have however highlighted to Government and Parliament our concern that if the opt-out from registration currently proposed is introduced registration could drop towards election turn-out levels.

The News Statesman is more reasonable than Hattie. It does make a good point about compulsion:

The Electoral Commission calls it the “biggest change” to voting since the start of universal suffrage in 1928. What has attracted the attention of the independent Electoral Commission, and the ire of academics, pollsters, electoral registration officers, the Electoral Reform Society and, belatedly, the Labour Party, is the Conservative-led government’s proposal to switch from a system of household registration of voters, which is vulnerable to fraud and error, to a system of individual electoral registration (IER), in which, crucially, it will no longer be compulsory for members of the public to co-operate with electoral registration officers.

It does seem to me that there is a debate to be had about compulsion. In theory the current annual canvas is compulsory. In theory you can be fined £1,000 for not making a return. In practice this never, ever happens. I defy you to find a report of anyone being taken to court and fined by any council. The compulsion issue is a red herring I suspect. If we had compulsory voting then compulsory registration might be logical. But, we don’t have compulsory voting. I would argue that it will become normal for political activists to work to get potential voters on the register. What better way of re-connecting people with politics? The alternative is to have local authorities prosecuting people on a large scale for not registering, people who don’t want to vote in the first place. This will not improve our politics. Compulsion implies punishment.

The bottom line here is that Labour calculates that in many ethnic minority households the man of the house block votes Labour on behalf of the entire household and that IER will hinder this. Harman’s commitment to female emancipation comes second always to her commitment to the Labour party’s electoral chances. She believes always that the means justify the ends.

This clip from Newsnight last night shows columnist Peter Oborne casually calling an EU spokesman an idiot, causing him to walk out, before he goes on crucify ex FT editor Richard Lambert. He flings his pamphlet “Guilty Men” at Lambert. Lambert takes offence at the connotations of the phrase Guilty Men.

Throughout the nineties I worked in banking and read the FT. I totally lost patience with the FT’s state-loving, corporatist Europhilia. It is great to see Lambert called to account for being so epically wrong (which was the point of Oborne’s historical reference).

Ed Miliband has made the worst mistake of his career so far. He has set a cap on university tuition fees at exactly the same level that the Coalition was aiming for until the greedy, inefficient universities decided to grab as much as they could. I can’t believe that in one move he has vindicated the Coalition’s policy on university tuition fees and rescued the LibDems from oblivion. According to the Guardian:

Labour would cut top university fees to £6,000, says Ed Miliband

Only on Friday Graeme Archer in the Telegraph pointed out that a whole generation of middle class parents and children would be forever offside with the LibDems over their U-turn on tuition fees. Now Labour has itself u-turned and saved their bacon.

The hillarious part of the whole announcement is that the original Coalition plan envisaged that the maximum fees would be £6,000 except in exceptional circumstances. Here is the announcement that Vince Cable made in Parliament:

For the funding of universities, Lord Browne recommended-in a report that the then Labour Government endorsed, I think, in their manifesto-that there should be no cap on university fees and a specific proposal for a clawback mechanism that gave universities an incentive to introduce fees of up to a level of £15,000 a year. That was the report given to the Government. We have rejected those recommendations and proposed instead that we proceed as the statutory instrument describes. That involves the introduction of a fee cap of £6,000, rising to £9,000 in exceptional circumstances.

The reason that the £6,000 cap has been largely ignored by our liberal, leftie universities industry is that they are simply too greedy and inefficient to stop at £6,000 and on the whole think that they can charge the same as Oxford and Cambridge.

There is essentially no difference between all three main parties on tuition fees now. You can see how Miliband thought that he was showing how grown up Labour were in accepting that fees had to rise. I can’t help thinking that a little mystery in this area might have won them many 100,000s of LibDem votes. Beautiful.

This Guardian headline quoted by council leader Julian Bell is a lie two times over.

The lying Guardian headline writers have changed nuanced IMF statements such as:

… a slower pace of deficit reduction would be necessary were the economy to continue to expand less rapidly than expected …

To:

IMF questions pace of cuts

Lie Number 1 is that the IMF’s questioning is contingent on continued weak growth. They do not say that the time has come to loosen fiscal policy. Indeed Jorg Decressin, an IMF economist, said:

Policy should only be loosened if growth threatens to slow down substantially relative to what we are forecasting.

Lie Number 2 is that the Guardian has elided “deficit” and “cut”. There are two sides to deficit reduction. One side is what you spend (spending less, “cuts”). The other side is income (taxing more). We know from past IMF statements that their approach to slower deficit reduction would be to tax less NOT to spend more.

The reason for this is that you can turn on and off tax cuts way more easily than you can turn on and off spending increases. A temporary loosening of fiscal policy (tax and spend) would be much more credible on the tax side than the spending side of the deficit equation. The IMF have specifically recommended a temporary VAT cut. The IMF does not question the Coalition’s spending plans in any way.

The Guardian is lying. Is Bell ignorant or is he simply happy to repeat something he knows is a lie?

Andrew Neil is probably a genius. He totally eviscerated LibDem president Tim Farron this afternoon on the Daily Politics. With one line he also destroyed Vince Cable’s spiteful rhetoric. Yesterday Cable said:

What I will not do is provide cover for ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys.

Neil points out that it was the Tory Lord Shaftesbury who led welfare reform in the 1870s. Both Cable and Farron are ignorant of the fact that it was Benjamin Disraeli’s Tory government that passed the 1878 Factories Act which banned children under 10 from working and made schooling up to 10 compulsory. An act that was opposed to by the then Liberal party.

You can perhaps forgive ex-Labour councillor Vince Cable from not knowing Liberal history but not Farron.