Command and control

A report on the Eastleigh by-election in the Independent earlier this week spoke of hundreds of Liberal Democrat workers being "drafted in". Anyone who is familiar with the party would know that you can't make a LibDem do anything. (A former chief whip likened his task to "herding cats".) The fact is that there was an enormous upsurge of volunteering as soon as it was known that vacancy had occurred in Eastleigh. It reminded me of the spontaneous mass desire to get back at the party's critics after Charles Kennedy was deposed. The vehicle then was a by-election in Dunfermline and West Fife, which saw the current leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, Willie Rennie, returned. It should be remembered that the psephological sage of Strathclyde predicted a win there for the SNP with us vying with the Unionists for fourth place.

This is not to say that the organisation of major by-election campaigns is amateurish in style or relies on inspiration and enthusiasm alone. Although we cannot afford the paid help that the Conservatives are able to put in the field, we now have enough seasoned campaigners (many of them helpfully in Hampshire towns and cities!) to run an efficient by-election machine.

Nor are the conservative media writing us off these days. In fact, there are several stories that the Tories have tacitly given up this fight, which immediately makes me suspicious. In spite of the good showing of the UKIP candidate, potentially taking Tory votes, the result looks likely to be close and any complacency fatal*.

Steve Richards in the Indy yesterday drew attention to the propensity of the current crop of Conservatives, including their Eastleigh candidate, to speak their mind, A-list or not:

An illuminating comparison can be made between Labour’s 1997 intake of MPs and the Conservatives elected for the first time in 2010. The response of most Labour MPs in 1997 was to be genuinely loyal to the leadership and for that enthusiasm to be combined with intense ambition to become ministers. There was much talk about “control freakery” at the top, but most of them were happy to be controlled. Parts of the 2010 Tory intake are markedly more independent – almost as a matter of principle.

It is a great pity that the 1997 intake was so obedient to the party machine. The state of the modern Conservative party is surely healthier, even though it gives more headaches to whips - and to coalition partners! - than New Labour was.

*Update 11:45: since writing the above, colleagues on the ground have confirmed that the usual efficient Conservative telephone canvassing operation continues at full pelt. It is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent lack of activity by Conservative campaigners on the ground, as I was when I was first drawn into a local by-election campaign. The eventual size of the Conservative vote was a surprise to me, but not to the experienced people running our campaign.

Herbert Samuel

Earlier this month there occurred the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Herbert Samuel. I wish I had done more than glance at the ODNB email on the actual anniversary, because Samuel was part of the great reforming Liberal government of the Edwardian era which I have referred to earlier (here for instance).

The ODNB biographer writes: "When the Liberals took office in December 1905, Samuel was appointed under-secretary at the Home Office. He was given wide latitude by the home secretary, Herbert Gladstone [son of William Ewart Gladstone, the 19th century Liberal prime minister], and succeeded in securing passage of several measures of social reform. His most significant achievement was the Children Act of 1908 (the 'Children's Charter'), which extended state responsibility to all children, ended child imprisonment, restricted corporal punishment, and instituted the first countrywide system of juvenile courts. A related measure in the same year established the 'Borstal' system of reformatory schools for juvenile offenders - Samuel claimed paternity of the neologism (so called after the first such institution at Borstal, in Kent). He was also responsible for the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act which, for the first time, created a national system of probation."

He later became postmaster-general in the Liberal government, during which he achieved one world first: an experimental air mail service - which however was judged a failure.

As we were saying

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9876685/David-Cameron-I-did-not-appoint-enough-women-to-Cabinet.html

Not only did Cameron not fulfil his pre-election promise to make one-third of his ministers women, he actually reduced the influence of women in his first major reshuffle.

Meanwhile, women in business are just getting on with it. I see that Byron, the leader in its field in Britain, is not only run by a woman but that she took over from another woman.

Devolution release 2.2

Just as Carwyn Jones and Labour have come around to the view that Wales ought to have the responsibility for police and prisons incorporated in the devolution settlement that Welsh Liberal Democrats called for from the outset, some of our supporters are looking at the way that police and crime commissioners are working and having second thoughts.

Meanwhile, on "Sunday Supplement" this week, Laura McAllister called for the Welsh general election voting system to revert to its original rules, whereby candidates may stand both in a constituency and on a regional list, as is the case in Scotland. Her reasoning was that Wales can ill afford to lose AMs of quality through forcing candidates to gamble which method to plump for. She may have been thinking of the losses of Helen Mary Jones of Plaid and Nick Bourne, the former Conservative leader in the Assembly in the last election.

She is surely right, but she does not go far enough. The AM pool is not large enough to service all the work that needs to be done in Cardiff Bay, let alone provide the quality necessary for ministers, without case-work suffering. An expansion to 80 members all elected under the same fair voting system, as proposed by Richards, is needed.

The idea was not to asset-strip Royal Mail

Four years ago, Liberal Democrat policy was to reinvigorate our postal services by selling 49% of the Royal Mail, ensuring overall control is retained by the Government and the staff, and to use some of the proceeds to invest in a modernised Post Office. Further, we would have put at least one-quarter of the Royal Mail into an employee-owned trust so Royal Mail workers become employee owners. Giving staff a stake in their employment beyond the pay-packet has been shown to improve business performance from co-operatives in this country to industrial enterprises in Germany.

I had thought that, with Vince Cable and Ed Davey in charge of business under the coalition, reorganisation was proceeding along Liberal Democrat lines, albeit rather more slowly than one would have liked. Since Ed has moved on to DEFRA and been replaced by a Conservative minister, there have been leaks that Tory thinking, that Royal Mail should be sold in a way that will raise as much cash as possible, has prevailed. The latest is in today's Independent, implying that no more than a ten per cent share handout is being considered as a sop to "the posties". The stage is set for finagling on the lines of that which enabled asset-stripping of well-known brands leaving only losses to be borne by the taxpayer.

Instead of USB as advisers, the Royal Mail should be employing John Lewis.

Australia win world one-day cricket championship

Perhaps England, the deposed champions, would have given the Aussie women a better fight in the final, but lost out in the Super Six stage. Perhaps if one or two batters had played up to their normal form, things might have been different. Certainly the bowlers, especially the remarkable Anya Shrubsole, did not let the team down. In an interview before the New Zealand play-off match, captain Charlotte Edwards was philosophical. Disappointed at her team's losses, she nevertheless saw the results as a gratifying sign of the improvement in standard of women's cricket world-wide.

Then there is of course the chance of revenge over Australia in the traditional form of the game in Buckinghamshire in August this year.

Green screen pioneer dies

In the 1970s, I remember my then father-in-law, a professional photographer, saying about a stunning (for its time) Kodak TV commercial which we were watching, manipulating moving images within moving images, that he had seen it being produced but that he had been enjoined not to reveal the trade secrets behind it. It dawned on me later that this must have been an early escape from the big film studios of what has become known as Chroma key. It was the invention of Petro Vlahos who has just died. He saw the possibility of replacing the complicated physical matte shot, which often necessitated skilled scenery painters, with something more reliable and capable of producing more spectacular effects. The use of blue screen and green screen was developed by his company and aided by the exponential growth in power and memory density of computers. Now the basic technique is available to anyone with a digital camera and a PC with a graphics processor, but we should not forget the original intellectual breakthrough from the days of celluloid.

MEP questions Cardiff Airport nationalisation

Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in the National Assembly have queried the announcement by Carwyn Jones that Rhoose Airport would be purchased for the nation, but it is left to a South-West English MEP to raise the question of its legality under EU rules about state aid.