Another cheesy PR stunt from Richard Branson

I read Richard Branson’s reminiscences (widely covered in today’s press) that he smoked dope with the Rolling Stones and had sex in an aircraft toilet (part bravado and part fantasy surely) and the cynic in me asks what is trying to flog us now? Too many cheesy PR stunts from Richard Branson over the years incline me to believe that he is just about to launch a product on the market or maybe he is still hoping for a decent price for Virgin Media.

25 days after the floods David Cameron visits Hull

David Cameron visited Hull yesterday – 25 days after the floods came. The local press was thus suitably sniffy, his visit generating four lines on page 12 in the Hull Daily Mail. Earlier in the day my wife had seen David Davis in WH Smiths in Hull, presumably waiting for Dave to turn up. If it had been me that had seen him I would have asked him a question about the leadership. But then what answer could he possibly give? How he must regret that conference speech.

 

I was sad to read about the death of Tom Steel. I never met him but I read his excellent book ‘The Life and Death of St. Kilda’ (a first draft of which, remarkably, he wrote at the age of sixteen) in my final year at university. I remember reading the notes about Tom Steel which described him as a ‘former television researcher turned producer and writer’ and immediately thought that would be an enormously interesting career path. So I looked at joining the BBC as a researcher and didn’t get called for interview. I even applied to a postgraduate course in Journalism at City University but didn’t get called for interview and tried several other routes of entry to that profession and didn’t called for interview. So I got the hint that this was not for me after all so went into marketing instead and the rest, as they say, is history.

  

Missing in Yorkshire: Five referendums

I have mixed feelings about the Government’s decision to abandon plans for a single unitary authority in North Yorkshire. I certainly couldn’t see the sense in creating a unitary with the sort of land area that was envisaged. So although I was pleased to see that particular plan scrapped, I think the job is only half done.

As part of the objection to the unitary plan there was a campaign to promote Harrogate as a unitary in its own right. This seemed to have widespread support in the town and I thought it made a lot of sense. I could imagine that other districts and boroughs in North Yorkshire might, over time, go down the same route. I did see this move and indeed the original proposal for a unitary to be predicated by referendum. After all when the issue of an elected regional assembly was to be put to a referendum a few years ago, an additional referendum was to be held in North Yorkshire to determine what form of local government people preferred there. So if a referendum was good enough then what is wrong with one now?

Sadly, this government seems hugely fearful of referendums. What is worse is the fact that in Yorkshire we have been promised four referendums over the years (five in North Yorkshire) and yet none have actually taken place. Along with that vote on an elected regional assembly, we were to get a referendum on the Euro, on a change to the voting system and on the EU Constitutional Treaty. I don’t wonder that people are cynical of politicians when popular participation is proposed by government and then months later snatched away or indeed just ignored. The trouble is that in this country such referendums are dropped like crumbs from the top table for the masses and usually only if governments have difficult decisions to make. What is missing from all of this is the ability of the people themselves to start a process for a national plebiscite. It is just this lack of process that is causing such a problem in Scotland on the issue of a vote on Scottish independence.

 It has been the case that referendums in the UK are de rigueur for matters of constitutional importance but this convention seems to have been abandoned given that we are unlikely to get a vote on the EU Constitutional Treaty (or Reform Treaty as I guess we should call it) and on House of Lords reform. In fact a vote on the latter would be quite interesting in my view because I suspect the question would emerge during a national  debate on the future of the House of Lords, which asked why do we actually need a second chamber, elected or not? If the House of Commons was elected by a more proportional system and its scrutiny committees had real power to hold the executive to account then the case for a second chamber is surely much reduced. After all Denmark and Finland have unicameral systems where their parliaments have really powerful scrutiny committees and they do not seem to suffer from any democratic deficit.

Opinion polls – what should we make of them?

Today’s ICM poll in The Guardian has the Conservatives at their lowest point since Cameron took over. In fact it is the first poll to show the Tories, whilst Cameron has been leader, below their 2005 General Election vote. Of course, the Guardian makes much of this, not least in its headline on the front page. But I wonder how surprised we should be by this poll.

It seemed to me that Cameron’s success in the early months of his leadership was as much a reaction to Blair rather than a particular appreciation of Cameron and the Tory party. I think it is easy to underestimate the incredibly hostile feeling there was towards Blair by the end. Most Conservatives of course were happy to see him go but even those on the Centre-left, including many in the Labour party, felt betrayed by Blair. The war was just a part of this.

It seems that Gordon Brown is picking up on that anybody but Blair support which Cameron had harvested for so long. This means that politics has entered into a very interesting phase in this country because, with Blair going, the certainties of the past few years have disappeared; that is that disaffected Labour voters could be persuaded to vote for the Liberal Democrats and, latterly, Dave’s Conservatives. It will be interesting to see how the two opposition parties regroup over the summer and at their autumn conferences.

On another, unrelated matter, I have been reading the Sustainable Railway White Paper and am yet to find any reference to Yorkshire. It looks to me as if most if not all of the £15 million budget will be spent in the south. Something I will come back to in the next few days.

Bulgarian nurses on their way home

I was delighted to see the release of the six Bulgarian nurses from captivity in Libya today. The Bulgarian MEPs in the European Parliament have been very active in raising the plight of these people and it was their efforts which first brought the case to my attention.

What is interesting is that outside the EU the Bulgarians had little or no diplomatic leverage with Gadaffi. Inside, however, the collection action of the EU began to have some effect, firstly on the death sentences being commuted and then today the release of the six nurses. It seems that there may have been some ‘blood money’ paid to the relatives of the infected children. Nevertheless this shows what collective action by the EU at a diplomatic level can achieve. Compare this with the fruitless actions the UK has taken against Russia over the Litvinenko case. That whole tit for tat expulsion thing was all too reminiscent of the foreign affairs of the beginning of the twentieth century not the twenty first. It will sink in eventually but Britain has to understand that it will achieve so much more in international relations through working with its EU colleagues.

Turkish elections

Today sees the General Election in Turkey. I was listening to a very interesting piece on the World Service which suggested that the governing AK party is well ahead in the polls and is thus likely to win another term. It remains to be seen what this will mean for the Turkish Presidency as there is likely to be the same stand off which forced these elections in the first place.

I’m no expert but I am interested in the way future EU Turkish relations will pan out post-election. There remains a sizeable minority of countries in the EU whose populations are against Turkish entry into the EU. Others such as the UK seem broadly in favour. It is a fundamental split that seems difficult to resolve, especially when politicians have staked a lot on their particular stance on Turkish membership (I am thinking of Sarkozy and Merkel here).

                                             

Personally I see Turkish membership as a positive thing. I don’t buy into this ‘Turkey is not a European country’ stuff. I’ve been to Istanbul and you would hard pressed to differentiate this from any other northern Mediterranean city. Also there is the issue of whose going to be doing all the work when I am retired. Europe has a demographic time bomb in the respect that our populations are increasingly elderly. Turkey with its young and growing population is a positive in that respect.

Where I do worry though is in the implications for democracy in the EU institutions when Turkey finally joins. For example, it is likely then to have a population of about 80 million, similar to that of Germany and it will therefore want a similar number of MEPs about 90. And of course it has been agreed that the European Parliament will not grow exponentially after each enlargement but will shave numbers off the total as we have already seen with recent enlargements. It will mean that the UK is likely to lose yet more MEPs. As it is in the Yorkshire and the Humber region each of our six MEPs currently represents about 800,000 people. With further reductions after Turkish membership this could go to over a million. I am not sure that representative democracy can work adequately in those circumstances. So perhaps other devices need to be considered such as a greater use of referendums and citizens initiatives, but more of that another time I’m sure.

As a final thought I read an article recently by a Turkish (?) academic, Cemal Kerakas, in the European Foreign Affairs Review which looked at an alternative integration process for Turkey and the EU. Essentially he dismissed the widely touted Associate Membership as untenable which it is (i.e. everything but the institutions – almost impossible for any politician to sell). Rather he argues a more an gradualist approach for example, initially sending non-voting MEPs to the European Parliament as did other applicant countries. I need to find this article and come back to it. I did not buy into it all but at least it contributed something to the debate when there seems to me a very narrow view of the options of future Turkish EU relations.

Last nights by-elections

Reflecting on last night’s by-elections, they show that despite the best efforts of some newspapers to write us out of the contests, we are still very much in the game in the run-up to any early General Election.

I think the party owes a great deal to the by-election candidates; I can only imagine the madness that their lives are for a couple of weeks. I went up to Sedgefield to support Greg Stone our candidate there. Essentially this was delivering leaflets in some of the villages to the west of Darlington. Despite the inevitable rain it showed itself to be a very pleasant part of the world and somewhere I would go back to for a less frantic visit.