Inappropriate behaviour in political parties

So far, I have only skimmed Helena Morrissey's report (summary and link here) into our recent difficulties, but it seems to me that bad behaviour by some men towards women, taking advantage of their positions, is unlikely to be confined to Liberal Democrats. One trusts, however, that Ms Morrissey has little cause for complaint when she conducts her follow-up review in eighteen months time.

The RTZ connection

Guido has an accusatory posting about the business interests of Sir Robert Smith, the LibDem MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, who has taken on the interim chairmanship of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. A new chairman has to be found because Sir Tim Yeo's conflicts of interest finally proved too much. (I don't suppose we have seen the last of Sir Tim; he has bounced back from scandal in the past.)

Sir Robert's declaration of business interests includes not only shares in Shell but also, I note, Rio Tinto Zinc stock. This continues an old Liberal connection. Former Liberal MP Frank Byers was a director of RTZ, and I have a vague recollection that Clement Davies, the party leader from the end of the war until Jo Grimond took over, was also a board member. Richard Holme (Lord Holme of Cheltenham) certainly was invited to join the board.

Tom Burke, who has been a parliamentary candidate for both the Liberal Democrats and before that the SDP, is Environmental Policy Advisor to Rio Tinto - and a contributor to The Green Book.

Are all these coincidences, or is there a chain going back to the mid-20th century here?

Across the sectarian gap

In this month's "Oldie", Melanie McDonagh recalls an interview she conducted with George Galloway. It "ranged from teetotalism to quantitative easing" but touched on religion. This was partly because of "persistent rumours that he had converted to Islam. Anyway, he wasn't saying if was true. 'What I say in these cases is that I believe in God and try to follow God's law'." He refused to be more specific and in my view he had every right not to do so.

Jews and Christians have historically been intolerant of each other's view of the God of Abraham, but the prophet was more liberal and realistic in this respect. Muslims are enjoined to respect other "people of the book" (which makes the recent attacks on churches and synagogues in Iraq and Pakistan a crime against religion as well as the law).

This was in the back of my mind when I caught the heartwarming report on this morning's "Sunday" programme. A historic synagogue in Bradford, which had its heyday during the city's prosperity when virtually a tenth of its more prosperous citizens were Jewish, but is now suffering from dwindling congregations, has been saved by financial contributions from the present-day Muslim community. The rising entrepreneurs of the twenty-first century have come to the aid of the successors of those of the nineteenth and early twentieth. The touching conclusion to Kevin Bocquet's report was that, when the sole custodian of the synagogue needed to take time off, he handed the keys for safekeeping to his Muslim colleague.

Weather and election outcomes

Thanks to Discover magazine, I learn that a study by the University of Nijmegen has investigated the effect of weather on voting patterns in the Netherlands. Over a span of forty years there is a small but significant disadvantage to non-Conservative parties resulting from bad weather on election day, the study finds.

The abstract on the Discover site raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps the full paper goes into them in more detail, but it is tantalising to have a glimpse of these data from a nation which is so close to us genetically but somewhat different electorally. What are the common factors? Do the Dutch have a significant postal vote? Is there a tradition of election-day cars provided by party volunteers? Did it make a difference as to whether the Christian Democrats (Conservatives) were in power or in opposition?

One of the bits of electoral lore I picked up during my early days as a party worker was that fine weather tends to favour the party in power. It would be interesting to know whether this is still true, if it ever was. Something which probably has changed over the years is the advantage to Conservatives of car ownership, but it would be nice if evidence for this could be teased out.

"Buggers Briefing against the Conservatives"

In the last few days, BBC certainly lived down to the version of its initials ascribed to Christine Hamilton. Gay marriage, while symbolically important, is not a matter of national well-being like the sluggishness of the economy or the inequities of the benefits system. It does not right a major injustice - that was already done by the Act that introduced civil partnerships - yet it occupied a quarter of Monday's PM programme and has dominated the domestic agenda on the BBC News channel.

Much as I relish the prospect of the Conservative party tearing itself apart over gay rights and EU membership, it is more with a view to future election campaigning than to the here and now. It is not, I respectfully suggest, for the BBC to join in a spectator sport which is not of real interest to 90% of the electorate. There is also the question of balance. If the Beeb genuinely feels that internal party strife is news, then it should also look at the agonies of the Labour party as it tries to reconcile internal differences in the formation of policy, not to mention Nigel Farage's efforts to paste a wallpaper of respectability over the UKIP rubble.

There are more important concerns over the Conservatives' performance in government. For instance, in spite of LibDem ministers' best efforts, disproportionate cuts are being made in the already low benefits paid to the worst-off in society. (I am not referring to the "bedroom tax" and the benefits cap, which are relatively fair and have -surprisingly to some - found favour among those surveyed in some recent opinion research.) I have posted earlier about the below-inflation rises in JSA and some other benefits. Of serious concern also is the implementation of Universal Credit. The concept is welcome, but the level at which it is intended to be paid and the restriction of access to it (only via Internet) are to be deprecated. Shortly, I hope to blog some research which has been carried out in Scotland showing its potential negative impact. The BBC  is in a position not only to analyse this and other research, but also to monitor the progress of the pilot UC programme and report on both.

La Mer - Trenet, not Debussy

If it hadn't been for Russell Davies's Song Show on Sunday, I wouldn't have realised that the centenary of Charles Trenet fell this month. It is a remarkable sign of the way we in the UK have turned our back on continental Europe that while the French media are going overboard in celebrating one of the 20th century's greatest singer-songwriters, there is hardly a ripple over here. Yet I can recall in the 1950s that Trenet and Jean Sablon rubbed shoulders on record programmes with the likes of Anne Shelton, Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. Even Trenet's equivocal relationship with the Nazi occupiers did not overshadow his popularity after the Second World War, a tribute to the quality of his writing.

The Song Show closed with the magical La Mer, in Trenet's own hit version. The melody itself was strong enough to survive the ministrations of Bobby Darin and others, but here it is enhanced by one of the greatest arrangements in popular music history, by the orchestra director Albert Lasry. (I see that most references cite Lasry as the composer as well, but the Columbia issue of the recording credits him only as the arranger.) I would put it up there with Gordon Jenkins' setting of The Folks Who Live on the Hill for Peggy Lee. Steve Martin was wise to set the balletic opening of L.A. Story to the Trenet/Lasry original rather than any of the later anglicisations.

Gleision mine trial: a further delay

Originally pencilled in for this autumn, the trial of MNS Mining and the colliery manager over the deaths of four miners in the drift mine in Rhos in 2011 will certainly be postponed until 2014. Since the charges were laid, counsel for Malcolm Fyfield has advised that his client may not be fit to plead. A hearing in Swansea today ruled that a determination as to fitness to plead will, having allowed for reports to be drawn up by experts for both prosecution and defence, be held in the first week of September, subject to the availability of the trial judge. Because the trial will take between three and four months, and because of restrictions imposed by the judge's calendar, it was decided to aim for a trial start date in January 2014, thus avoiding a break over Christmas.

Panic in the Conservative hierarchy

Shortly after the coalition agreement was arrived at in 2010, I predicted that the Conservatives would win the next general election with an overall majority, Labour making practically no gains and Liberal Democrats being the main sufferers. I did this without joy, based purely on my reading of political history. I also predicted that Liberal Democrats in government would keep their side of the coalition bargain, but that the Conservatives, as the economy improved, would be emboldened to break the agreement. This would lead to a change of government at least, but possibly also an early dissolution of parliament if Labour were deceived into thinking that they would do well at the ballot box.

Today, I am not so sure. Certainly, the Labour party, by failing, in a time of financial hardship, to regain in the English county election results the wards it lost in 2009 has shown that it will not be capable of mounting a national challenge when the economy is on the up. On the other hand, I assumed that the Conservative party would turn more Thatcherite, but remain monolithic. Now the possibility of their MPs splitting three ways has suddenly arisen after the media-fuelled rise of UKIP. The likelihood of a split* is still remote. However, David Cameron's flip-flop over an EU referendum is not only a panic acknowledgement of its possibility but also a sign of weakness in the face of his little-England critics who have immediately asked for more.

My own view is that an "in-out" referendum should have been in the coalition agreement and held as soon as possible after the government took office. Both Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos implied that the UK electorate would have been allowed to express their view on EU membership, though the weasel words "major change" were in the small print. Such a referendum would have replaced the pointless and more damaging one on Alternative Vote. I am also confident that there would have been  shown to be only a minority voting for change.

The danger for the next government, whether Conservative or coalition, is that an EU referendum will be used by Labour as a vote against the government as a whole, not on the merits of EU membership - just as they did with AV, which, it should be remembered, was a Labour idea.

* I envisaged some of the more extreme Tories forming a UKIP parliamentary party (see the closing paragraphs of this Nadine Dorries piece from a year ago), the core Conservative party becoming more reactionary and in response the more liberal and socially aware Conservatives switching to the Liberal Democrats or possibly even Labour.