Yes, Vince Cable should not have said he’d block the Murdoch takeover of Sky but the other stuff is totally unremarkable. It is perfectly obvious to one and all that had he resigned from the government at any point up to now then the coalition would have been in deep trouble. (The same may no longer be true due to the fallout from this.)

However, the fact that he was entrapped is what bothers me. Moreover it ought to bother anyone who might have to contact an MP about a constituency matter.

This underhanded piece of agent provocateurship does a profound disservice the democratic process as it operates in the UK. (What passes for a democratic process.) Anything which undermines what little restraint or influence constituents can have on their MPs between elections is to be deplored.

I heard some journalist on the radio saying that everyone understood that if as an MP you said you were talking “off the record” then that would be adhered to. If you didn’t – and Vince hadn’t in those terms – then you were fair game. That totally ignores the fact that Cable did not think he was talking to a journalist; he thought he was talking to a constituent. There is a world of difference.

Of course he would not have said these things to a journalist. But most people say things to others they don’t necessarily mean. In some cases it’s known as being polite.

Also, things said in private may not always correspond to public utterances. An employee, for instance, may be less than enthusiastic about his/her employer when not at work – sometimes even at work – but never to the boss’s face.

We are not, here, discussing criminal behaviour (where such tactics by journalists may be justifiable in uncovering wrongdoing) but about the interaction between a representative of the people and his constituents. Cable had, I believe, not even done anything against the ministerial code of conduct as he had not yet actually made his decision about the takeover. It certainly hadn’t been announced. He was guilty only of boasting, puffing himself up; as I suspect most MPs would/do in these situations.

An MP has the right to expect that those who come to him for help as a constituent are who they say they are. Otherwise it will be difficult for him or her to do their job properly.

This journalistic sting succeeded in that it revealed Vince wasn’t too happy about aspects of the Government’s programme.

Hmmm.

Didn’t we know that already? And that other Lib Dems felt similarly?

Who potentially benefits from all this fuss about nothing?

Murdoch and News International.

That tells us a lot.

I see that there has been transport chaos in England today. Roads and airports have been closed and motorists have been stranded in their cars overnight.

I trust that Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray and high profile Scottish Tory David McCletchie will now be demanding the resignation of the relevant UK Minister as obviously he (or she, I’ve no idea who has that responsibility, if anyone) is to blame for this totally avoidable occurence.

Well congratulations!

That’s the first time I ever recall my first poppy sighting of the year not to be on the chest of a politician.

I caught one of Manchester City’s board wearing one while watching the Lech Poznan game on Thurday night.

Normal service was resumed on Friday when Tory MPs were sporting them in the House of Commons.

Saturday lunchtime and the Football Focus boys were also bedecked – even the behind the scenes ones supposedly preparing for Final Score. The BBC enforcers were obviously on the ball.

Every single one of these poppies was the kind with the green leaf. I.e. the ones us mere mortals of the public can no longer obtain.

It’s at least three weeks to Armistice Day. I can’t help feeling that such ostentatious display is more than a little unseemly.

The most alarming thing to me about George Osborne’s Spending Review yesterday was the figure given for direct job losses. It was 490,000; nearly half a million. There were also suggestions that indirect job losses in the private sector would match this in scale.

Nearly one million people extra out of work. Think about that for a minute.

Even if we take the smaller number that means, yes, half a million people not being paid by the government. But if there are no private sector jobs for them to move into (don’t forget the half million indirect job loses too, so there may be no slack there to be taken up) then they are going to be on the unemployment register – and being paid by the government.

Where exactly is the saving, then?

These newly unemployed people will also not be spending the amount of money they were when they were employed – if they spend any at all beyond food. This will inevitably affect private sector firms who will lose sales they might otherwise have had; thereby making the recession worse.

This savage cutting is surely a case of wearing a hair shirt for the sake of wearing a hair shirt. It is by no means inevitable.

I heard Mr Irresponsible saying that the Government didn’t want to make cuts; it had to make them. This is self evident nonsense. There was a choice to be made. And the cuts fall mainly on those on benefits; by definition those who can least bear them (and also those least to blame for the situation.) I don’t deny that some cuts are necessary but I dispute their rationale and decry their scale. Only lip service was paid to ensuring restitution from the real creators of the financial problem the Government has; the bankers. There was no black hole in the UK’s finances till their actions brought on the present situation, we had to bail them out, Government income plummeted due to the ensuing recession – and the bankers promptly carried on behaving exactly as before.

I thought one of the lessons of the 1930s depression was that you do not end one by cutting and cutting and cutting. You create employment by investing in infrastructure and the like. This injects money into the economy and the private sector starts to pick up.

Joseph Stiglitz says it better than I could.

And the dig at social housing was uncalled for. If there is a logjam in provision for social tenancies then the remedy is to build more houses for rent – at reasonable rental rates. (By the by, if local councils had been allowed to build more houses from the proceeds of Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation there might not be a housing shortage now.) I noted too that they have already started to nibble at the BBC.

I well remember the Thatcher cuts and the devastation they wrought; from which many parts of the UK have still to recover.

This will be worse.

And it may not even get rid of the debt.

I learned earlier today that Cyril Smith has died.

He was one of those few people who genuinely deserve the description larger than life. I do not mean that in any pejorative sense even though he was a large man.

He was one of the most distinctive politicians of the 1970s and 80s. What marked him out was that he seemed to be a human being. Though a spokeman for his party he also spoke for himself, apparently not toeing the party line. As Liberal MP for Rochdale he brought a fresh forthright perspective to political debate and was one of the main driving forces behind the Liberal revival. What he would have made of his party’s present situation I don’t know but I suspect he would have been as outspoken. I’m sure his personality caused some people to cast their vote who might not have otherwise.

A few months ago when another blog referred to Abdelbasset Al Megrahi‘s lingering longer than it had been suggested he might and linked to a website which lists famous people who are getting on a bit (I put that politely) I had been surprised to learn that Smith was still alive. He seemed to have been absent from the news for so long and I had thought he had left us long ago.

Now he finally has and I find I am saddened by it.*

Cyril Smith: 28/6/1928- 3/9/2010. So it goes.

*Edited to add:- perusing other blogs and following up what they said it has come to my attention that like a lot of prominent people Sir Cyril not only had feet but also, it seems, other extremities of clay.

Not content with threatening to use the atom bomb on Iran and China while he was only a Parliamentary candidate, I see our wet-behind-the-ears Prime Minister has now opened his mouth yet again only to put his foot in it.

Whatever your private thoughts, when you are in the position he is you really have a duty to temper your speech.

And moreover, to talk down (even insult) Pakistan when you are in India! It beggars belief.

On the world stage he really is a liability.

Don’t they teach them anything useful at Eton?

What do you do when all around you are screaming, “We’re doomed!”?

It seems the answer is to add to the screams.

When one country starts to make cuts to its spending, that doesn’t matter too much. When they all do….?

Wasn’t this the sort of thing that brought about the Great Depression?

What sense does it make to take jobs in the public sector out of the economy when the private sector is manifestly incapable of taking up the slack? Not only do you not make as big a saving as it might seem – you lose the income tax on the pay of those who are not employed to fill any vacancies and possibly have to pay out benefits instead on top – you also lose the spending power of those jobs in their local (and the wider) economy and so lose the stimulus they might give.

It seems daft to me.

Wasn’t it government spending that brought an end to the Depression? I read recently Congress delayed the US recovery by several years by kyboshing some of FDR’s plans for a stimulus.

Savage cuts and an increase in VAT are both things I had a premonition near certainty about under a Conservative government.

Plus ça change….

Double dip recession (and worse?) on the horizon?

Yesterday, despite them being a running background to my adolescence, for the first time ever I went on a demo. It was for the Fair Votes (Take Back Parliament) campaign and took place in Edinburgh.

This is the (slightly sparse) early gathering.

The procession was from St Giles Cathedral to New College on The Mound.

At The Mound

An MP (Mark Somebody – I didn’t catch his surname) addresses the multitudes.

Purple Flags

The purple stands for liberty it seems – or was it justice? I wore a purple shirt.

There might have been about 300 hundred people taking part. Not bad for something organised within a week. Along with the organisers the police were given a vote of thanks. Hardly a revolutionary mob but you’ve got to start somewhere.

What do we want?

Fair Votes!

When do we want them?

(Well, preferably about thirty years ago. But hey: it’s never too late.)

And guess what?

We have an unelected Prime Minister.

(Well, I didn’t vote for him.

Only 33,973 people actually did.)

There has been an extremely unpleasant sub-text to the criticism Gordon Brown has suffered ever since taking over at No 10 – and even before that. He has been subjected to torrents of intolerant abuse; mainly, perhaps, because he is Scottish. We shall need to see what the future holds but at least until England has some sort of constitutional arrangement similar to those holding in the rest of the UK it may be that no Scot nor Welshman may ever be PM again.

I thought nothing became Gordon Brown so much as his leave-taking of office which was dignified, restrained and a rebuke to those who have characterised him so badly, but did play a bit too much on sentimentality.

And so we have a coalition government. I can only hope that the Lib Dems will be able to restrain the excesses the Tories would undoubtedly have inflicted had they governed alone.

But this is what government should be like. It hasn’t done Germany any harm. With coalitions we would almost certainly have had neither the Iraq War nor the Poll Tax. I also don’t think electoral reform would be in the offing without it.

The posturing of some Labour MPs unwilling to countenance a deal with the Lib Dems or, still less, PR was purely for party advantage reasons. They reckon Labour would some day be back in power on its own and to hell with the country and the depredations a Tory government might inflict on it in the meantime. (A similar consideration applies to those Tories opposed, but in the reverse sense.)

P R – even the minimum requirement of the Alternative Vote – is still not here, though. I wouldn’t put it past the Tories to find some way of sabotaging the proposed referendum. There will still be Labour MPs voting against it too.

As I write I have no idea how the talks between the Tories and the Lib Dems to form a “stable” government are going.

NIck Clegg is, though, treading dangerous ground. If he trades principle for a Cabinet seat and does not at the least get from the Tories a commitment to a referendum on a proportional voting system for Westminster elections and he subsequently actively props up a Mr Irresponsible premiership I suspect a large segment of the Lib Dem core vote will abandon them at the next election. Or before if any arrangement manages to last: there are elections to the Scottish Parliament next year, plus local elections.

Even with such an agreement many in Scotland may still do so.

BBC Scotland is tonight screening a programme titled Why Didn’t Scots Vote Tory?

I know 17% of those who voted in Scotland did actually do that very thing but why devote a programme to the subject?

I can answer the question in one word.

Thatcher.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the size of the scar her administrations left on the Scottish political psyche. The swing to Labour in Scotland on Thursday is a reflection of the abhorrence with which Scots voters still regard the possibility of a Tory government inflicting such depredations on the country again. It is almost in the nature of a folk memory. Parents probably imbibe their children with it along with their mother’s (or their formula) milk.

Similar feelings pertain in large parts of the north of England too – witness Rochdale staying Labour despite Bigotgate and a credible Lib Dem challenge.

Symptomatic of this feeling was a caller to a BBC Scotland phone-in with Annabel Goldie (the Scottish Tory leader) who asked apropos of a putative state funeral for the so-called Iron Lady, “Does she have to be dead first?” It can be found on the BBC iPlayer. It’s about 33-35 minutes in.

Elvis Costello perhaps summed it up best. (Warning. He swears in the preamble.)