ANC leadership feeling the strain

The former Archbishop Desmond Tutu's public repudiation of the African National Congress government may have been driven by a growing resentment that religious leaders are no longer given credit for their part in the fight against apartheid, but the immediate cause of his outburst - the withdrawal by the Dalai Lama from a visit to South Africa - raises the issue of a wider disquiet.

Appeasement of the Chinese, big investors in Africa, may have been behind the Dalai Lama decision. Charges of corruption still hang over president Jacob Zuma, who has now begun a PR offensive. Part of this, an invasive photo-shoot with the ailing former president Nelson Mandela, has not gone down well.

Dangers for the parties in government

In my opinion, the danger to the Conservatives' electoral prospects does not come from immigration or from continental Europe. These fears will recede as prosperity increases. It may not be prosperity on the scale of the false boom of 2006/7, but people will feel better by comparison with the last few years. What the two governing parties must not do is to overreact to the UKIP bubble by enacting more authoritarian and xenophobic legislation. This is particularly important for Liberal Democrats, who would lose members as well as votes by turning more reactionary.

My real fear is that as the economy becomes more active, the Treasury and the Bank of England will lose control of inflation. There is already a threat to the well-being of the most disadvantaged families with the deliberate pitching the annual uprating of many benefits at no more than 1%, well below the current CPI inflation of 2.5%. (Shopping-basket inflation may well exceed this.) We are told that if it had not been for Liberal Democrats in government, there would be no increase at all. I trust that this unfairness, which is far more iniquitous than the freezing of the higher age allowance or the room-restrictions of housing benefit, will be addressed in the Liberal Democrat manifesto for the next election. Labour have been headlining the "granny tax" and the "bedroom tax" rather than the more disadvantaged benefit recipients   either because they fear being lampooned as being on the side of scroungers or calculating that better-off pensioners are more likely to vote.

Now we have a warning that the income of mortgage-holders will be straitened over the next five years. The negative equity of the late 1980s shook the then Conservative government. It will not be long before Labour rediscovers Mondeo Man - and of course forgets its enthusiasm for printing money when in office.

Waiting in the wings is a possible increase in crime rates. We have benefited from a reduction in reported crime across the western world but this decline can surely not go on for ever. As economic activity increases, so other social activity, including the illegal variety, is likely to increase also. Even a small increase across the board in reported crime is going to fuel a Labour campaign, especially as the imposition of police and crime commissioners by the coalition can readily be cited as a cause.

Dodgy data don't help the case for EU membership

Pro-membership coalition ministers are wont to claim that three million jobs would be at risk if the United Kingdom ceased to be a member of the European Union.

However, Professor Iain Begg revealed on "More or Less" (a BBC/Open University co-production) last Friday that the three million figure resulted from research he had done around the year 2000 and had been calculated as the proportion of jobs in industry related to exports to the EU. Clearly not all exports to the EU would stop instantly if the UK left, tariffs need not be an insurmountable barrier and new markets could be found for, say, the estimated 40% of car production which goes to the EU.

Professor Begg explained that numerical arguments on both sides of the debate depend on a huge range of assumptions and that it is a "methodological almost impossible task" to measure the net cost or benefit to the UK of being part of the Union.

So in the end it is a political and cultural decision as to whether to remain. It seems to me that we have a choice between cementing an alliance with nations with a shared history going back more than two thousand years, an alliance in which we have a democratic say, or becoming yet another client state of the United States.

Labour's county elections strategy did not work

A further thought on this week's elections: if the Labour rhetoric about "tax-cuts for millionaires"* and attacks on the "bedroom tax", which seemed to be the main thrust of their campaign for Thursday's local elections in England, had resonated with the voters, then they would have swept the board. As it was, a 1700% increase in their number of councillors was registered by UKIP, a party which, if anything, would like to reduce taxes on the well-off even further and would remove most allowances (apart from invalidity benefits).

After the election, the talk switched to "jobs and growth". It is a pity therefore that, when Nigel Farage appeared on BBC News Channel's post-election analysis programme yesterday, Chuka Umunna did not challenge UKIP's leader to spell out his proposals to increase employment. To be fair, the other panel members also concentrated on UKIP's immigration policy, though Ed Davey was the only one to take on Farage's assertions about EU migration and demolish them.

* In fact, as Mark Pack's graphic shows, for every £1 gained by the well-off, £5 is recovered from them in other ways as a result of successive coalition budgets.

UKIP has broken the class barrier

Although leading Conservatives like Ken Clarke and David Cameron have attempted to distance themselves from the United Kingdom Independence Party, it has always been clear that UKIP and Tories are of one mind on such issues as Europe, immigration, social services and education. That many parliamentary Conservatives could happily take the UKIP whip if this was already an established party was exemplified by David TC Davies's remarks on Sharp End last night. I have found that the overlap is even more marked among activists.

All the more remarkable then that thousands of people in the South Shields constituency, who would one assumes rather be seen dead than voting Conservative turned out for UKIP, putting them in second place in yesterday's by-election. Perhaps I should have been more alive to the implications of John Bufton's success in the last EU elections, halving Welsh Labour's representation in Brussels.

If this class-blind voting pattern continues through to 2015,  there is a threat to Labour* as well as Conservatives outside London and South-East England.

In theory, George Osborne and the Tory "dries" in the House of Commons ought to be reassured that UKIP, who are even more reluctant to increase the welfare budget, have done much better than Labour in the English county elections. However, the Conservative leadership must be worried about a split in the parliamentary ranks.

* Mark Pack has a graphic illustrating the damage done to Labour this time.

Our ministers must keep an eye on Royal Mail

After 1997, Labour allowed Post Offices and Royal Mail to wither under public ownership. The Conservatives were obviously intent on allowing both to be asset-stripped, so there was hope when the coalition was founded that there would be a progressive solution for what are still essential services. Regrettably, the decision was taken to have a full-scale sell-off of Royal Mail albeit with 10% of the shares being offered to staff.

There is a FT report behind its paywall:
 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/efe7c606-b0d5-11e2-9f24-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2S2oo0o23  which has been confirmed by a short para in other papers yesterday. The involvement of at least two high-powered banking advisors, with no doubt consequential high fees, concerns me. I still think a co-ownership solution could have been found and there is no shortage of expertise in this field.

North Wales child abuse investigation: too late for some

What do the abuse-deniers have to say about the latest report?

It is too late for about a dozen people who have taken their own lives since suffering abuse, according to Wrexham Councillor Keith Gregory, speaking on Radio 4's "Today" programme. Perhaps, as in the case of Jimmy Savile, we will only have something like the whole truth when all the perpetrators are dead.

Here's hoping for another Welsh Football League club

Good luck to both Newport and Wrexham today. If they are able to hold on to their leads from the first leg of the play-offs, there will be an all-Welsh final to decide which team joins Mansfield in returning to the League for the 2013/14 season.