That Limerick in full

Earlier today I was stymied by Twitter's 140 character limit when posting my limerick about the Conservative Culture Secretary. Here's what I had to post:

A Tory called Jeremy Hunt
Got new powers from a Telegraph stunt
He hid his cards well
But you always could tell
He was going to act like a c

140 chars - no opportunity to finish.

So with the luxurious extra legroom of the blog, here it is in full:

A Tory called Jeremy Hunt
Got new powers from a Telegraph stunt
He hid his cards well
But you always could tell
He was going to act like a comrade of Rupert Murdoch.

Comment to the BBC on Jody McIntyre interview

Here is the comment I posted here in response to BBC News editor Kevin Bakhurst's defence of Ben Brown's aggressive and offensive interview with Jody McIntyre last night on BBC News, which can be viewed here.

I complained last night, immediately after watching the interview.

My objection is simply illustrated. Were Ben Brown to interview Charles and Camilla about having paint thrown at their car, would he repeatedly ask whether they were asking for it? Would he reference comments that Charles had previously made about other subjects to suggest they justified the attack? Would he ask whether Camilla had thrown anything at the protesters, and then, once she denied it, would he ask again?

The answer is of course no to all of those questions. The same respect should have been shown to Jody. This man did nothing wrong, was the subject of a documented assault by the police, and was treated to a hostile interview as if he were a government minister proposing a controversial new law.

It's not acceptable, it's not responsible and the BBC should sack Ben Brown for it. I'm sure he will find a welcoming home at Sky News, whose viewers are far more used to prejudice and ignorance being rewarded.

Letter to Nick, Vince and Danny

Dear Messrs Clegg, Cable and Alexander,

I am not a constituent of yours; I am not a student (it's been 20 years); I live in Scotland, where the tuition fees policy you are currently deciding upon will have no effect; in short, I have no dog in this hunt.

I know that you never expected to be in this position, from a number of perspectives. You didn't expect ever to be held to account for your tuition fees pledge. You didn't expect ever to be part of a coalition government with the Conservatives. And you didn't expect ever the immense, intense anger which this issue has generated among the British people.

But there are some things you did know. You knew in April, when you pledged to vote against fees increases, precisely what the financial situation in the country was, and the scale of cuts that were necessary. You knew in May, when you entered coalition government, that the decision to cut far deeper than necessity dictated was not what either you or the Conservatives had been given an electoral mandate to do. And you know now that you still genuinely have a choice here, despite the rhetoric, to meet your pledge.

You are hiding behind words like "coalition" and "deficit" to avoid facing the political reality, but really this situation is nothing new. A minister who finds himself at odds with government policy on a point of principle should leave the government and vote against it. It has happened many times before and it will happen many times again.

That is what you should do. It is what you must do if you are to remain credible.

I already know your answer.

Yours regretfully,

Duncan Hothersall

Fairer votes: the phoney war

Setting aside the arrogant London-centricity of the decision to hold the AV referendum on the same day as Scottish and Welsh general elections, there is something even more absurd about the debate over AV. The people fighting for AV, in the main, don't actually want it; and the people fighting against it are, in the main, actually united by their opposition to something entirely different.

I find myself in the former camp. I am a strong believer in proportional representation. In fact I think anyone who attempts to argue against proportionality in a democratic system has no leg to stand on, since the entire basis of democracy is proportionality. But AV won't deliver PR. AV is really a bolster to the first-past-the-post system, effectively including a run-off vote in every constituency to ensure that the winner gains more than 50% of the vote.

On the other side of the argument, if you scratch the surface of a vociferous opponent of AV you will really find a vociferous opponent of PR. They can see that even a small shift away from pure FPTP has the potential to open people's eyes to the attractiveness of full PR, and they want to make sure that doesn't happen. Oh, they are rehearsing the arguments against AV - Churchill has been wheeled out more than once despite his opposition to AV being based on his view that the public were too stupid to use it effectively - but they are really opposed to PR. Ask them. The honest ones will tell you.

So here we are in the middle of a phoney war. We're all fighting over a system in which none of us have any really interest, while the real prize - true proportionality in democracy - has been quite effectively hidden away by the entrenched beneficiaries of FPTP in Westminster. Even so, this is our best chance to open a chink in their armour. So I'll be voting Yes to AV in May, and I urge you to do the same.

Vince: from a power Cable to a blown fuse

His decision has been half-leaked and hinted at for days, and was finally drawn out of him with a whimper this evening. Vince Cable will abstain from the Commons vote on his own proposal, as Business Secretary, for increasing tuition fees. He has allowed himself, and his party, to be the ultimate fall-guys for a Tory policy which he implacably opposed a few months previously.

The Lib Dems are insisting that coalition means they have little choice. Nick Clegg at DPMQs today even made a reasonable stab at defending the alleged fairness in the policy while he was desperately refusing to say how he will vote on it. But Vince Cable - the economic whizz who predicted the banking failure, the best leader the Lib Dems never had, the hero of the election campaign - has taken a hit from which his reputation among the electorate will likely never recover.

The great irony of course is that it was Vince who memorably told Gordon Brown in the Commons that his reputation had gone "from Stalin to Mr Bean". And yet, even as Vince's fall is being played out across the news channels, Gordon's reputation is bolstered by the revelation, from Wikileaks, that in diplomatic negotiations he worked hard to secure justice, but never publicised that work for his own aggrandisement.

Vince Cable used to be the most popular and respected politician in both the House and the country. Coalition has flipped him over and exposed his pure politician heart, prepared to do anything to anyone for power. "Yellow Tories" has never been a more apposite description.

Coulson diversions unravelling

Three weeks ago I blogged about how the timing, execution and end result of the announcement of cuts to child benefits suggested that it was more about press cover than deficit reduction. (The announcement was rushed out, a surprise to senior ministers and the media alike, on the day that Channel 4 showed the Dispatches programme which exposed the complicity of Andy Coulson in widespread phone hacking.) The idea of avoiding the "cost" of means testing by excluding people on the basis of total household income simply didn't stand up to proper scrutiny, and the fact that joint incomes of £80k plus didn't exclude CB while an individual income of £45k did was categorically unreasonable.

More evidence emerged today to back up the suggestion that this was policy on the hoof. According to the WSJ, the Treasury is in disarray over a policy they are calling "unenforceable" for a whole range of reasons well laid out in the linked article.

The bottom line is that it undoubtedly will be more expensive to implement this "is there a higher-rate taxpayer in the household" approach than it would have been to create the means-testing which George Osborne claimed would be too expensive itself to give any overall benefit. And that means that the policy cannot have been checked by civil servants, in the Treasury or in HMRC, before being rushed out as a surprise announcement the day that Dispatches aired.

It was Coulson cover. The cover is blown.

A brief observation re the destruction of the British economy

Just a simple point really. We had an election in May, and with due respect to the nationalists in the nations, the choice people faced was between the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Labour party.

• The Tories said they wanted to cut "the majority of the deficit" in this parliament.
• The Lib Dems said that the Tories plans would jeopardise the recovery, and they argued for a slower deficit reduction.
• Labour laid out plans to halve the deficit.

The people chose to elect 307 Tory MPs (on 36% of the vote), 258 Labour MPs (29%) and 57 Lib Dems (23%).

In other words, we elected more MPs from parties that wanted a slower, measured deficit reduction than from those that wanted a quick one. And we voted in far greater numbers for parties that wanted a slower, measured deficit reduction than for those that wanted a quick one.

And yet, when the Tories and Lib Dems got together, instead of creating a halfway house between their economic policies, they somehow agreed to cut the entire deficit in this parliament - an extreme policy that neither had campaigned on, and no-one had voted for.

So the next time a supporter of this government tells you this is what the people voted for, tell them what a load of nonsense that is. No-one voted for this except the privileged handful who negotiated the coalition deal.