Ed’s inbox – March 11th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

If Ed Miliband could only read five blogposts each day, he’d read these ones…

It’s incompetence, stupid – Progress
By Paul Richards

In the 1970s, you waited months to have a telephone line installed, your car broke down, shops closed for lunch, and you couldn’t get a decent coffee without flying to Milan. It was, frankly, all a bit rubbish.

Once the label of incompetence attaches itself to an organisation, it is very hard to remove. It becomes a magnifying glass through which every failing and fault is made more huge. It creates, to use the political communicators’ favourite word, a ‘narrative’. Labour leader John Smith knew this when he addressed the House of Commons on 9 June 1993, in a debate on the Tory government’s collapsing economic strategy. It was just moments after ex-chancellor Norman Lamont had given his resignation statement. The peroration included the lines: – Read more.

Questions To Which The Answer Is No #546: Is John Rentoul ever wrong? – Owen Jones
By Owen Jones

Since I inflicted my online ramblings on the world a couple of months ago, I’ve had the real honour – privilege, even – of featuring in John Rentoul’s renowned ‘Questions to Which The Answer is No’ column no less than three times. That’s three more times than Rentoul appears in the index of Tony Blair’s literary tour de force A Journey, and it’s not like he didn’t earn it.

Rentoul launched the column, you see, because he is a flickering flame of Blairite sanity in a world consumed by neo-Bennite madness. Fortunately, he has that rare political insight you can only get from scouring the internet for hyperbolic rhetorical questions to debunk. – Read more.

Boris Johnson holds “public rail summit” in private – Snipe
By Adam Bienkov

Boris Johnson was accused of breaking his manifesto promise to hold a “public summit of all the train operating companies” today as he met with operators behind closed doors.

London Assembly Members and the press were denied access to the meeting, following months of negative coverage of snow delays, above inflation fare increases and overcharging.

Assembly Members had been allowed to attend the Mayor’s first meeting with operators last year under the condition that they remained silent.

Repeated requests to attend today’s meeting were denied. – Read more.

Coalition in danger of being ‘oiliest government ever’ – Left Foot Forward
By Daniel Elton

The Cameron administration has a firm aspiration to be the ‘greenest government ever’, but the reality is turning out to be quite different. Alongside having a transport secretary who advocates gas-guzzling changes to public policy, and continuing to encourage road-building in a time of austerity, it turns out that the person almost certain to head up the coalition’s environment and energy policy is a former BP policy advisor. – Read more.

Stupid Historians – Hopi Sen
By Hopi Sen

A letter has appeared in today’s Times opposing the Alternative Vote. This missive has been penned, or endorsed, by several prominent historians.

As you may know, I am a very mild supporter of AV. Still, this letter has given me the RAGE(tm).

Here’s the essential paragraphs (full text here for those beyond the pay-wall):

“The referendum on May 5 that threatens to introduce a system of “Alternative Voting” – a voting system that will allow MPs to be elected to Parliament even if they do not win the majority of constituents’ first preference votes – also threatens to break this principle.

For the first time since 1928 and the granting of universal suffrage, we face the possibility that one person’s casting ballot will be given greater weight than another. For the first time in centuries, we face the unfair idea that one citizen’s vote might be worth six times that of another. It will be a tragic consequence if those votes belong to supporters of extremist and non-serious parties.”

Let us avert our eyes from the unfortunate confusion between “majority” and “plurality” in the first paragraph. Understanding the difference requires only the most cursory understanding of mathematics, but as a History graduate, I can confirm that this is not regarded as an essential skill for burgeoning historians, except for those boring ones who study trade, or agricultural production or some other tedious byway.

Nor am I irritated by the idea that AV might make one vote worth “six times” that of another. This is mere boilerplate propaganda, and such simplistic piffle is as attractive to historians as the rest of us.

No, what enrages me is that these prominent historians don’t seem to know their British political history. – Read more.

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