Welcome to the Celebrity Big Politics house. Want to hold elected office? Forget all that nonsense about dutifully campaigning for your party at local level for a decade or two, maybe serving as a councillor, or getting your head around the subtler nuances of important policy issues.

Just concentrate on getting your name into the papers instead, or maybe start your own radio station or something.

Even demonstrable sympathy for the basic values of whichever party offers you the gig has nowadays pretty much been reduced to an optional extra.

Hence Comrade Digby can be parachuted into a ministerial job, while Tony Lit gets to be Conservative candidate in a high-profile by-election, just days after writing a four-figure cheque to Labour.

Thankfully, London mayor hopeful Boris Johnson is at least a bona fide Tory, and a politician more serious than his public image. But he remains better known for being on telly a lot than whatever it was he was party spokesman for until this morning.

As a general rule, picking political pop stars disempowers activists in favour of placemen and placewomen. But as the party leaderships see it, that’s just another another advantage. We need to do whatever we can to scupper this trend.

I see that the Tories have bravely opted to instigate a US-style primary contest, open to all London voters, to decide their standard bearer for the contest to run Europe’s biggest city.

Can I just urge all non-Tory London readers to participate and lump behind whichever runner looks like the biggest liability?

Look what might happen if we fail to act. I mean, I’m sure Beyoncé would make an excellent secretary of state for defence. It’s just I think she should have to spend a few years sticking leaflets through doors before she gets a crack at the job.

And sure, cannabis is a mind-altering substance. Some medical studies reportedly show that prolonged heavy use can result in psychosis. With no relevant expertise in the subject, I’m happy to take the specialists’ word for it. But alcoholism can – and in countless cases every year, does - also have that effect.

I’m told available varieties these days are several times more potent than the stuff I freely consumed as a 1970s teenager and a 1980s student. But does that necessarily mean greater consumption? Surely today’s kids only need toke on one or two stronger joints, instead of the half a dozen or so typically passed around when me and my mates used to spend the evening getting wasted back in the day?

Yet in the space of about a week, both the Tories and Labour have hinted at the possibility of reclassifying cannabis as a class b drug, rendering simple possession theoretically liable to five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

This, despite the fact that the first cohort of the hippy generation is probably squandering some of its old age pension on the odd quarter now and again, if only to relieve the rheumatism pains.

This, despite dozens of MPs having openly admitted trying the stuff, and despite the leader of the Conservative Party himself having been grounded at Eton as a schoolboy after being caught with a joint.

If it wasn’t an inappropriate wisecrack in the circumstances, it would be tempting to ask what either Iain Duncan Smith or Gordon Brown have been smoking. The debate should be about decriminalisation instead.

Attitudes horribly reminiscent of class politics remain rather more widespread than the Financial Times would like, a new international opinion poll reveals:

Large majorities of people in the US and in Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalisation …

In response to fears of globalisation and rising inequality, the public in all the rich countries surveyed – the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain – want their governments to increase taxation on those with the highest incomes. In European countries, a large majority want governments to go further and to impose pay caps on the heads of companies.

These findings are an instant answer to those who argue that there is no potential popular base for leftwing politics. The ‘them and us’ mentality hasn’t gone away. Progressive taxation – much like social ownership of major utilities – remains in line with majority public opinion.

In a democracy, majority public opinion is supposed to prevail. It is an illustration of just how far all mainstream parties have come to identify exclusively with the business interest that even such basic social democratic notions no longer get a look in.

It would be interesting to get a backset of this data. Was there ever a time when privatisation, fat cattery and general neoliberalism enjoyed widespread backing? I rather suspect the answer is no.

In short, the British left could not ask for more favourable conditions to make the wider case for entry level basic Marxist ideas, centred on the existence of separate classes and their irreconcilable interests. Why aren’t I surprised that it continues to fluff the task?

They talk of Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients and 90/10 ratios. But strip away the jargon economists use to discuss income distribution in Britain today, and the message is clear. The UK has become a dramatically more unequal society since 1979.

Even after a decade of New Labour, that trends continues unabated. But at least it has managed to reverse the non-stop growth in absolute poverty that commenced under Thatcherism, which is the minimum its members and voters would expect from it. Check out the facts for yourself at this website.

The period 1998/1999 to 2004/05 saw six years of uninterrupted decline in poverty statistics, with improvements among pensioners and children particularly noticeable. Even so, in 2005/06, that achievement slammed into reverse gear: the number of people in poverty grew by 750,000.

And the end result? Using the most widely accepted benchmark – household income at 60% or below the median household income – some 13m people, representing 22% of the population, are living in poverty.

Yet poverty can substantially be eradicated, even under a capitalist society. The comparable 2002 figures are 2.6% for Sweden and 3.9% for Norway.

Now the other parties are trying to get in on the act. Following the recent Tory package from IDS, today the Liberal Democrats have published a plan they claim will lift 5m out of relative poverty by 2020. Only another 7m people left to worry about, then. But, hey, let’s gloss over that one.

The proposals will be funded by taking entitlement to tax credit away from 2m families made up of ‘higher earners’, while increasing child benefits by a fiver a week, and paying state schools a ‘pupil premium’ of £1,500 a head to take on poorer kids. State pensions would once again be index-linked.

The suggestions seem welcome enough. But just one question: how does a relatively modest fine-tuning of means testing, spaced out over more than a decade, amount to anything like the ‘radical new agenda’ Lib Dem spokesman David Laws proclaims it to be? It certainly isn’t going to turn Stockwell into Stockholm overnight.

Should Gordon Brown call a snap general election for this autumn? There’s certainly plenty of speculation at Westminster to that effect right now.

On the face of it, it might prove a smart move. The ‘Brown bounce’ sees the new prime minister around six points ahead of the Tories in the polls. That’s quite a pay-off simply for not being Tony Blair.

Meanwhile, Cameron is getting plenty of grief. His rightwingers are revolting following two humiliating by-election defeats last month, and even the Daily Mail is giving him a hard time for choosing a photo opportunity in Rwanda over a photo opportunity in his flooded constituency.

Matthew Tempest at Guardian Online offers this:

A Labour MP last night confirmed that the party was on "election footing", following a series of poll leads, well-received policy initiatives and last night's successful UN resolution on Darfur …

Sir Menzies Campbell has suggested that Mr Brown might use his speech at the Labour party conference to call a snap election - and insisted the Liberal Democrats are ready for one.

In addition, Mr Brown has conspicuously appointed Douglas Alexander, the international development secretary, as elections coordinator, and asked Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister, to start writing a manifesto.

On the other hand, bear in mind that Labour is skint. As the 2006 accounts recently published by the Electoral Commission recently reveal, it is something like £1m in the red and shedding staff, while the Tories have a surplus of £4.2m and are hiring.

Here’s a different take on the snap election claim, this time from Philip Stephens of the Financial Times:

[T]he prospects of the innately cautious Mr Brown throwing the dice in an autumn election must be close to zero. Barring a Tory implosion, I am almost as sceptical about a spring 2008 poll …

Yet hard as it is to see Mr Cameron winning, it is much easier to imagine Mr Brown losing. The boundary changes will reduce his majority to between 50 and 55 seats. That means the Tories need only win an additional 25 or so seats to leave the prime minister heading a crippled, minority government. A swing of 1.5 per cent, half that achieved by William Hague in 2001, would do the trick. To my mind, Mr Brown will not face that risk until he has to.

So should New Labour go for it or not, readers? The comments box is open.

Biffen was an Oxbridge-educated middle-class English Tory rightwinger from the shires, Brown - pictured left - exemplified that layer of Scottish working-class opinion plainly influenced by CPGB Stalinism.

I’m not a fan of either political tradition, of course. Yet both men deserve some credit for a common characteristic: they were not afraid to say what they thought.

Biffen and Brown started from worked out political principles, and then openly argued for them. Both were out of favour with their respective party leaderships as a result.

I’ll leave it to the rightwing blogosphere to assess the impact of Biffen’s career and the legacy of his ideas. As the obits tell it, he was of an intellectual rightist bent.

It has to be said that Brown was never taken seriously on the wider left, not least after the court case in which he was cleared of breaking into his ex-lover’s flat and stealing two pairs of her knickers.

But whatever his peccadilloes, he remained committed to his conception of socialism right until the moment his liver packed in, becoming a founder-member and parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Socialist Party.

In short, neither of these people fitted in from the focus-group driven, don’t say boo to a goose, on message politics beloved of both the Parliamentary Labour Party and the milquetoast Tory opposition today.

Gone is any idea that one essential element of political life is to persuade the electorate of the correctness of a defined political philosophy.

In its place we have institutionalised Dutch auction populism serving as a smokescreen for organised kleptocracy.

And they wonder why the British electorate is increasingly apathetic.

There’s an interesting by-election coming up on September 13 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent Central, a deprived outer London area with inner city problems.

Last year it featured on a list of the ten most dangerous areas in the capital, ranked by number of muggings:

Stonebridge in Brent, north-west London, was in tenth place with 209 robberies. It was the scene of a triple family murder over a drug row on the Stonebridge estate last year, as well as the double murder of seven-year-old Toni-Ann Byfield and her drug dealer dad in 2003.

Labour is standing Zaffar Van Kalwala, somebody I know nothing about. Potential canvassers should email brentlabour@hotmail.co.uk, stating Labour Party membership number and times of availability.

Respect is running Sarah Cox, a retired teacher and longstanding member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Wards like Stonebridge represent an acid test for the Galloway-led organisation: if it really is capable of making headway in working class areas without a predominantly Muslim population, this is the kind of place it will have to prove it.

Other candidates include Funmi Aladeshe (Conservative); Brian Orr (Green Party); and Sandra Elina Wiltshire (Liberal Democrats). As ever, the comments box is open to campaigners from all parties.

Luke Akehurst lists some of the runners and riders in forthcoming Labour selections in two London seats.

Campaign Groupie Neil Gerrard is throwing in the towel in Walthamstow, which has for opted to nominate his successor through an all women shortlist.

Early frontrunners seem to be leftwinger Laura Bruni, secretary of the constituency party, and Stella Creasy, a councillor and erstwhile bag carrier for Douglas Alexander.

Meanwhile, ‘Keith the Teeth’ Hill is standing down in Streatham. Those looking to replace him apparently include Lambeth council leader Steve Reed; local GLA member Val Shawcross; and Compass supporter Chuka Umunna.

There’s also speculation that Harriet Harman’s partner Jack Dromey, deputy general secretary of what was the Transport and General Workers’ Union, is also interested.

Local Labour blogger Lambeth Lou also names Lib Peck, the cabinet member for environment, and Sally Prentice, the cabinet member for children and young people as potentially ready to put their names forward, especially if Streatham also decides for an AWS.

The prime minister today unveiled his vision of a ‘New Politics’. But Gordon Brown’s erection of an even bigger big tent surely marks a further step in the continued rightwards evolution of New Labour.

That can be seen by looking at the track record of the two Tory MPs who will now be helping to making policy for a Labour government.

John Bercow - son of a Jewish taxi driver – is a former member of the Monday Club, and at one stage the secretary of its immigration and repatriation section.

His CV also includes stints as national chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation that even Norman Tebbit felt compelled to close down for being too right wing, and as a special adviser to disgraced treasury secretary Jonathan Aitken.

To his credit, Bercow has repudiated his political past and reinvented himself as a cuddly Cameroon. That is more than can said for Patrick Mercer, who only this year was forced to step down from the Conservative front bench after claiming that the army practice of calling black soldiers "black bastards" amounted to nothing but common or garden services joshing.

Meanwhile, Brown has offered his first major political interview since arriving at Number Ten, selecting the explicitly rightwing Daily Telegraph as the outlet. The choice will not have been accidental.

This gave him the ideal opportunity to riff on the ‘government of all the talents’ theme that led to the appointment of Sir Digby Jones, the nastily anti-union former head of the Confederation of British Industry, as trade minister:

"I want us not to be in any way sectional but be a government that genuinely unifies the country.

"The reason that people are fed up with the old politics of division is that people recognise that we face new challenges and these challenges need to be met in new and different ways."

My trouble is with all this is, I don’t actually want to be unified with racist rightwing Tory bigots. And why not even the hint of a job for anyone within the substantial minority of the UK electorate – perhaps 10-20% - politically to the left of New Labour?

The PM should remember that people outside the tent sometimes have the most unseemly manners when it comes to urination.

Full employment always used to be a basic tenet of the post-war consensus, not a transitional demand from outer space. Yet for the last three decades, it has effectively been written off as a policy objective.

Tory chancellor Norman Lamont was famously happy to describe lengthening dole queues as 'a price well worth paying' for low inflation; I was one of the guys that paid it in the early 1990s recession. Thanks for nothing, Norman.

Meanwhile, Labour leader Neil Kinnock branded the very idea of full employment 'a slogan' and 'a not altogether illuminating phrase'.

Currently the whole question is not a high-profile political issue. After all, there are ‘only’ 1.65m people out of work and claiming benefits, and the trend is downwards.

But the true number of jobless is far, far higher. On some estimates, one in four British men of working age are either unemployed or economically inactive.

The official statistics exclude those with working partners, those with savings more than a few thousand pounds, and those deemed to have quit work ‘voluntarily’, even if they were in fact sacked.

And time was when 1.65m out of work would have rightly been seen as a scandal. That’s why the Tory ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster deployed in the 1979 general election campaign – when 1m were on the dole, a tally that seemed staggering at the time - is to this day hailed as one of the most effective advertisements in British political history.

The labour market is as much a social institution as an economic institution. Jobs get destroyed through financially-driven mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, low investment, bad training, the pursuit of short-term profit goals, high dividend payments and poor management.

The free market isn’t working. That’s why joblessness needs to be addressed politically. Policies that would facilitate full employment include improved education and training; more social housing, to enable greater mobility; investment in better public transport, so that people people can more easily get to work; and social provision of public goods.

After all, if we can have targets for inflation, interest rates and monetary growth, why can’t we have a target for reducing unemployment?

General elections are the apogee of the liberal democratic political process. These are the occasions – once every four years or so – that the ordinary subjects of Her Majesty, as a collectivity, are theoretically in the driving seat.

For weeks now, the media has been full of speculation over whether or not Gordon Brown is planning to ‘go to the country’, as the euphemism has it. Will he or won’t he ‘seek a renewed mandate’?

We are likely to know shortly. If the answer is yes, the vast majority of the electorate will engage with politics and politicians to an extent seen only two or three times a decade. Yet somehow, the words 'general election fever' do not seem to sum up the mood of the nation.

Some sections of the far left have long been dismissive of ‘bourgeois democracy’. Like Lenin said, it’s just a sham, right? Parliament is nothing but the executive committee of the ruling class. Voting is just another way for the bosses to sell the pass.

Well, yes. But there is another side to the story too. Winning the vote in Britain took hundreds of years of class struggle, from the Levellers to the Chartists and the suffragettes. We are only three generations into universal suffrage, remember.

Around the world, all revolutions in recent decades have been revolutions for plain vanilla liberal democracy. These revolutions have been velvet, orange, cedar, rose or saffron aux choix. Any colour you like, so long as it isn’t red.

The monks being killed on the streets of Rangoon as I write these words are being butchered by the Burmese junta because they are demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, who draws her legitimacy principally from her landslide victory in Burma’s 1990 election. They want the right to vote, and are prepared to die for it.

Compare and contrast the attitude in Britain. Many people forego putting their names on the electoral register simply to get out of paying council tax. It’s not that millions of people have suddenly bought into the Leninist critique of what goes on at Westminster; it’s just that they can’t be arsed to go to the ballot box.

A few days ago, Tory leader David Cameron even remarked on the phenomenon in his party conference speech:

[W]hat about the 40% of our fellow citizens who have given up on voting? They are just fed up with the whole rat-race of politics, the whole merry-go-round. We have got to inspire them that we can bring real change and deal with the things that people care about. People want the politics of belief and that means politics they can really believe in.

His comments both get the point and miss it by a wide margin. In the early 1980s, the differences between Labour and the Conservatives were sharply defined; Bennism and Thatcherism offered competing visions of society. Which side were you on?

Maybe there are still policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives. If I sat down for half an hour and thought about it really hard, I may even be able to name some of them. But none spring instantly to mind.

Today, all major parties subscribe completely to the free market consensus. British politics is reduced to a permanent state of small c conservative politics; vote for us, we’re more competent/nicer guys than that other lot.

Sorry Mr Cameron. Few people are going to get inspired about that.

Leona Helmsley - the billionaire New York City hotel operator and real estate investor who died in August this year – once loftily pronounced to her housekeeper: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes’.

She came to wish she never said that, when in 1989 her former maid quoted the two short sentences in a courtroom as her erstwhile boss stood in the dock on a federal tax evasion rap. Honestly, you just can’t get the staff these days.

So the woman they called ‘the Queen of Mean’ received an initial sentence of 16 years. She only served 19 months, mind you. One can only hope she had a miserable time.

Listening to the deafening volume of whingeing from private equity executives the in the wake of Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday, it is clear that the spirit of the late Ms H lives on.

Until now, the Kings of Mean have gotten away with paying proportionately less tax than their cleaning ladies, as some in their ranks have openly admitted.

Darling’s milquetoast move to scrap taper relief will indeed ensure that ‘those working in private equity pay a fairer share’. Then again, almost any change would. Capital gains tax of 18% is not fair enough, by far.

Meanwhile, there is also to be a levy of £30,000 on ‘non-doms’ – wealthy people who live tax-free in Britain – after seven years of residence. The idea is a response to Tory pressure.

You could almost describe it as ‘Tory pressure from the left’, were not £4,286 a year such a nugatory figure for people worth tens, or hundreds, or even thousands of millions of pounds.

The ultra-rich do not live on another planet from the rest of society. They benefit extensively from the way the whole of British politics and society is currently shaped around the needs of finance capital.

Hint, guys. If you use, directly or indirectly, publically funded services – the air traffic controllers that make sure your private helicopter flies in safety, for instance, or the educational system that provides you with clerical workers capable of doing their jobs – then you have to foot your share of the bill. Just like the rest of us have to.

There is a convincing case to be made for higher taxes on the rich, even if no politican today dares make it. It could easily be sold to the public, including Middle England. It all depends on how the money raised is spent.

Britain suffers from the irrational myth that public investment is by definition squandering money. The fact that Sweden and France have superior healthcare is regarded as unrelated to their higher levels of public spending.

Rightwing newspapers often campaign for such things as higher pay for nurses, but are against the tax rises that would be needed to pay for them.

The CBI moans about taxation ‘burdens’ on business, then in the next breath calls for better road and rail infrastructure. And it stays strangely silent when anyone suggests that tax credits amount to a massive taxpayer subsidy for low pay.

Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday will have little real impact on Britain’s new polyglot plutocracy. Maybe Leona Helmsley is looking up from Hell and smiling after all.

Of course the left in Britain should favour a referendum on the European Union reform treaty, an issue that will dominate official politics for months to come. But it needs to make absolutely certain it doesn’t line up with UKIP and the Daily Mail in the process.

A referendum is the only politically honest course for Labour, after having promised such a vote on proposals for an EU constitution.

The only reason for the prime minister to pretend that the reform treaty is not essentially a repackaging of the document rejected by the Dutch and the French is the certain knowledge that the chances of securing assent are slimmer than a bulimic supermodel on amphetamine sulphate.

Resort to such a flat-out lie that will both bolster distrust in the political process and feed the Tories’ ‘Bottler Brown’ meme.

On the other hand, old-style left calls to pull out of the ‘bosses’ club’ because it is ‘not socialist’ end up pandering to nationalism in much the same way as promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’. The EU clearly has many progressive aspects.

It has secured some major achievements over the last two decades, including the single market, the single currency, a common foreign policy and an increase from 12 members to 27.

In today’s Europe, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a good thing. The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united Europe

However much it suits some politicians in Britain and Scandinavia to deny it, it is quite clear the EU’s founders explicitly envisaged it as a federation in the making. The very least that can be said is that the EU seeks to transcend the notion of exclusive national sovereignty. It is already a federal system. A weak federal system, perhaps, but a federal system nevertheless.

That shouldn’t be a problem for us in principle. Socialists favour the closest possible voluntary unity of peoples, in the biggest possible state units. After all, we have traditionally demanded a United States of Europe.

Nevertheless, there is plenty to oppose in the EU as presently constituted: the lack of democracy, the neoliberal economic agenda, the ‘Fortess Europe’ mentality.

The Common Agricultural Policy - which takes up 40% of the EU budget – remains an abomination. How individual countries wish to support farm incomes is a matter solely for their governments and electorates. One size doesn’t fit all.

It’s quite clear that any serious social democratic government, of the Attlee or Mitterand stripe, elected in any European country, would at the very least have to radically renegotiate its terms of membership, and in all likelihood would have to withdraw. However, we are a long way from needing to have that sort of tactical discussion.

In the mean time, instead of lining up with eurosceptic front organisations such as Better Off Out, parties of the left should be advancing positive demands for democratisation: a European parliament with real powers in place of the unaccountable bureaucracy, and a levelling up of social wages, union rights and working hours across the EU.

Sources of financial support symbolise - perhaps more than anything else - the different class bases of what Labour once was, and what it has today become.

Historically, few wealthy individuals have donated to an ostensibly socialist party out of political conviction. True, there were always a handful of working class boys made good, and those intellectually converted to Fabianism.

But most business backers of Labour - from Kagan to Maxwell, from Ecclestone to Abrahams - can fairly be labelled spivs and shysters. They are parvenus and arrivistes; in the words of that withering Tory put down, these are the sort of people that have to buy their own furniture.

New Labour’s tawdry crack whore-style dependence on what gets creamed off from the proceeds of rack-renting Newcastle slums offers democratic socialists an open goal to argue for the highest standards in political life. Such a call should certainly constitute one of the central planks of any platform of a renewed left.

We could make this our political monopoly, and we damn well should. As far as winning the support of the general public goes, this is the closest it gets to a one-way bet.

Corruption - sometimes petty, often not so petty - is an issue across the entire political spectrum, of course. Those of us that remember the Major years will be well aware of that.

If relatively few Lib Dems have been found with their fingers in the till in recent decades, that is largely on account of their continued distance from office rather then evidence of superior moral fibre.

Even sections of the far left have sometimes been happy enough to pimp their politics in return for a fistful of dollars from sundry petro-kleptocracies.

But the democratic left is sufficiently unsullied to make the demand for political transparency a speciality. Here are some policy proposals that deserve at least debate.

Let’s start from the proposition that political parties should be funded - if not entirely, than very largely so - by their own members and openly-declared supporters.

Individuals should be signed-up members of political parties before being allowed to make donations on more than the most modest of scales. It is surely only acceptable for someone to write out a six-figure cheque - or even a seven figure cheque - to a party if they strongly support its policies. Otherwise, the suspicion has to be that they are seeking either simony or bespoke legislation.

Let the political affiliations of both trade union executive members and board members of companies that make political donations be contained in the relevant annual reports. Most trade unionists don't keep it a secret. Business people shouldn't either.

Members of unions that donate to the Labour Party consciously have to opt in to the political levy. So why shouldn’t corporate donations - which no longer go exclusively to the Tories, remember - should be subject to similar strictures. Let shareholders vote on the question, and have the right to ‘opt out’ by withholding their share.

It is also necessary to oppose any further extension of state funding, and to examine ways of scaling back of existing provisions. There is a basic democratic principle at stake here. It just is not the job of the taxpayer to foot the bills for political parties, especially ones they heartily oppose.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of existing laws against allowing considerations of personal gain to influence the performance of public office. Yet in all the decades of Tory and New Labour sleaze, only Aitken and Archer have actually done time.

Let's just say that a fair chunk of those who have served in successive New Labour cabinets should at least be looking at 40 hours of community service, to put it mildly.

For the uninitiated, T&S Original Magic Knickers – available from Littlewoods here – promise instantly to transform the larger lady into a svelte beauty who will knock the guys dead as soon as she dons her little black number.

But there’s just one snag, girls; a backside the size of a small planet, even when crammed into doubtlessly wonderful elasticated underwear, remains a fat arse.

There is simply no way for New Labour to get round the fact that it promised Britain a referendum on the EU constitution document; not even rebranding what was once brie and cucumber on ciabatta as a plain old cheese and Branston pickle sarnie removes this obligation.

Making such a point is not indicative of any latent UK Independence Party sympathies on my part, either. If a referendum did take place, I would listen to both sides in the debate, but as things stand, I would be minded to vote ‘yes’.

Of course, the British left has traditionally opposed the European Union. That line has pretty much been set in stone since the UK’s referendum on Common Market membership back in 1975. It’s just a bosses’ club, right?

And yes, there is much to dislike in the EU as things stand, from its pervasive bureaucracy and lack of democracy to the entire Fortress Europe bunker mentality.

That’s before we get to the entrenched neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Maastricht comprehensively rules out nationally-based Keynesianism policies for full employment.

Currencies – in around half the member states, anyway - cannot be depreciated, because they are subsumed into the Euro. Public expenditure is capped by European law. So even social democratic governments are forced to ‘restore competitiveness’ by cutting costs and axing jobs.

The Common Agricultural Policy, which takes up 40% of the EU budget, is an ongoing fiasco. With the varying weight of agriculture across the continent, there cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ policy on support farm incomes.

Yet – dare I say it? - the old left mindset sometimes panders more than a little to nationalist sentiment, to the point where certain Campaign Group MPs happily make common cause with rightwing Tory eurosceptics.

The EU has its progressive aspects, too. A lot of the pro-employee regulations New Labour routinely boasts of bringing in have not been introduced of the government’s own volition, but largely at the behest of Brussels.

To some extent, the EU has served as a popular front for social democracy by stealth, a consideration not unimportant at a time when British trade unions lack the weight to secure such reforms.

The EU must rank as one of the dullest topics that anyone can conceivably blog about. But then, there are virtues to dullness; read any history of Europe in the 1930s and you’ll see what I mean. Today, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a clearly good thing.

The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united democratic Europe.

However much it suits some politicians in Britain and Scandinavia to deny it, it is quite clear the EU’s founders explicitly envisaged it as a superstate in the making, as do its principle protagonists today.

The very least that can be said is that the EU seeks to transcend the notion of exclusive national sovereignty. It is already a federal system. A weak federal system, perhaps, but a federal system nevertheless.

That is not something socialists should automatically be against. It is the left that has historically called for a United States of Europe, remember. The key question is the class interests such a polity would be based on.

Taking the balance sheet as a whole, then, the socialist left should oppose the EU as currently constituted. But the way in which we express that opposition is crucial.

We are not Little Englanders and we are not irreconcilables. We shouldn’t lend credibility to hard right Tory and UKIP fronts such as Better Off Out. Instead, we should put forward positive demands for a more democratic Europe.

Of course she is right to say that ‘a culture of no one works around here’ prevails on some sink estates. Let’s agree with her on that. But is she right in thinking that the answer is to make the jobless homeless as well?

Perhaps we should instead be asking some rather more searching questions about how this situation came about, why it continues, and what can be done about it than our hapless housing minister cum Melanie Phillips manqué can seemingly manage.

Being unemployed - or at least the threat of being unemployed - has always been the lot of this country’s working population. I remember that from my own upbringing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Working class people mostly, well, worked; the clue’s in the name if you search hard enough, Caroline. But sometimes they didn’t. In 1966, my dad had a heart attack and spent an extended period ‘on the sick’. Sometimes people went on strike, others had jobs that were seasonal in nature.

But unemployment was never seen as permanent; spend a few weeks or a few months signing on, and something would turn up. The ‘culture of no one works around here’ didn’t come until Thatcherism.

In just a few years, the steel industry, shipbuilding and coal mining were destroyed, as an entirely predictable consequence of government policy. Inevitably, so were the communities that depended on them.

As a young man who would once have easily found industrial employment, I spent two years on the dole. Older men and women who had put in decades of graft knew they were never going to be employed again. Want a good reason to really, really hate the Tories? By the early 1980s, we had three million of them.

The cultural impact was devastating, and remains with us to this day. The phenomenon known in economics textbooks as ‘discouraged workers’ is not the least aspect of all this. Now it has become an intergenerational in nature. But our response has to more intelligent than mock Dacresque outrage at the fecklessness of the proles.

What Flint should face up to is that pockets of persistent unemployment have become a potent symbol of Britain’s post-war economic failure. Full employment – once a basic tenet of cross-party consensus politics – has over the last two decades been successively reduced first to a radical left demand and then to a largely forgotten idea.

A party that based itself on the ideas of social democracy and a significant working class membership would have understood all this; it would realise that if you can have targets for inflation, interest rates and monetary growth, you can have a target for job creation; it would want to reverse Thatcherism, rather than take it to its reductio ad absurdum.

New Labour is obviously not such a party, as Ms Flint’s ugly little outburst rather underlines.

Does Britain need a written constitution? Traditionally, this isn’t an issue to which the left has paid much attention.

Either it has been written off as being of little importance, or else the very concept has been seen as favouring conservative forces in a society. As a result, the ruling class has essentially been able to make up the rules of the political game as it goes along.

But with the latest hint from justice secretary Jack Straw that such a development is likely over the next decade or two, it is clearly time to sharpen up our ideas on this one.

Should we be for or against the proposal in principle? Broadly, I think known constraints on governments have to better than unfettered extemporisation. This country is one of only a handful in the world to rely on unwritten guidelines in constitutional matters. New Zealand and Israel are the only others that come to mind.

Actually, there has been rather a lot of constitutional reform since 1997. The trouble is, much of its characterised by timidity.

New Labour’s idea of modernisation has seen Britain move from the fifteenth-century principle of heredity to the eighteenth-century principle of patronage. This at a time when the public is increasing alienated from the culture of the machine politics.

House of Lords reform has persistently been fluffed. Britain remains one of only two countries in the world where hereditary chieftains still pass laws for the rest of the nation; the other is Lesotho. Half the second chambers in parliamentary democracies around the world are wholly elected, and half the remainder are largely elected.

The Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, on the other hand, do represent democratic advances, albeit of a limited character. The proportional representation system used to elect these bodies should be extended to Westminster, so that a wider spread of political opinion can be represented.

We’ll have wait and see what Straw comes up with, I suppose. But the debate over a future constitution could offer a real opportunity to promote some basic democratic demands; we’d be mad not to take it.

Then again, the world has changed tremendously over the last quarter of a century, say. Political analysis has to keep pace. Just because somebody advanced a position in 1983 and advances a contradictory position in 2008, it does not automatically follow that they are mutating into a reactionary.

This train of thought has been sparked, in part, by my toe-curling recollection of a student union meeting in the early eighties, at which I opposed a resolution calling for Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. My argument was that the Chinese annexation of 1951 had introduced proletarian property relations to a backward feudal country, and was therefore historically progressive. Such was the Trotskyist orthodoxy of the day.

Fast forward to now, and I am in full sympathy with the protests that have rocked Lhasa, illustrated by the smuggled-out picture of rioters courageously stoning a cop car. I now think firmly that Tibetans are entitled to self-determination, as are Chechnyans, Kashmiris and Palestinians. So have I moved right on this issue, or have I moved left?

Outside of a few whackjob cults, the idea that incorporation inside a 'workers' state' in possession of a command economy trumps all other conceivable considerations finds few takers. I guess the contemporary equivalent is the notion that putting oppressed nations in charge of their own affairs 'objectively aids imperialism' if the oppressor is an Islamist or former Stalinist country.

Britain's most widely-read leftwing blog, for instance, recently opposed independence for Kosova because it is said to constitute a 'gangster state', born of a 'great power-orchestrated' break-up of Yugoslavia, and dominated by prostitution and drug-trafficking.

Even if such obvious nonsense were true, it is hardly 'swallowing exaggerated Nato propaganda' to point out that 90% of the population of Kosova didn't want to remain a province of Serbia; end of chat. If a marriage has irrevocably broken down, no-one would deny a battered wife a divorce because some pig of a man won't give his consent.

What's more, the last time I checked, the far left wasn't arguing for the revocation of Italian independence on account of the role of organised crime in Sicily and Naples.

Again, 25 years ago, I used to insist - with full Marxist conviction - that apartheid was integral to South Africa as a social formation; therefore, only a process of permanent revolution could bring about its demise. Subsequent developments have revealed this position to be, in plain English, bollocks.

True, the democratic gains for ordinary black people since 1994 have not been matched by higher living standards. The bourgeoisie is still predominantly white, even if it has been forced to accomodate a black section. Yet however far short South Africa falls of what I would have wanted to see, it seems inherently a better place now than when Afrikaaner rule was untrammelled.

Similarly, a quarter of a century I would have maintained that the British ruling class was committed in perpetuity to the maintenance of a Unionist statelet in the North of Ireland. Yet the trajectory ever since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 has been towards incorporation of the top layer of nationalists into the formal structures of governance

Fundamentalists leftists - fundamentalist republicans too, come to that - will point out that this is a far cry from a 32-county socialist republic. But it does offer an improvement on the bloodshed that previously prevailed, and a settlement with which the bulk of those effected clearly feel they can live.

What's the moral of this story? Well, if you are a young Trot reading this, never argue that 'there are no reformist solutions'. Not only is that a dull cliché, but the truth is - at least where an issue reduces essentially to a demand for democracy counterposed to a denial of democracy - there almost certainly is a reformist solution. What's more, it won't always be a sell-out or a step backwards, either.

Don’t go breaking my heart, Yazz. Unlike the real victims of McCarthyism, you are not the subject of a concerted campaign of vicious untrue allegations, fabricated in an atmosphere of febrile paranoia. You straightforwardly admit to attending six conferences of an organisation called the British-American Project, which is all that Pilger accuses you of doing. You challenge not a single one of the facts he puts forward.

There is no way you are on a moral par with the hundreds of progressive Americans who spent time in prison on trumped up charges, simply on account of their political sympathies. Any attempted comparison amounts to hyperbole of a wilfully stupid variety. It’s an insult to good people.

Let’s take your wretched parallel further. McCarthyism saw perhaps 12,000 US citizens lose their jobs, in many cases spending decades out of work as a result. There’s just a teensy-weensy contrast between their fate and your role as a regular broadcaster and national newspaper columnist, no?

And before you go making up fictitious bodily injuries, bear in mind that the repression born of McCarthyism drove some people to suicide. The senator from Wisconsin cost them their lives.

Remember the old adage, Ms A-B; there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so long as they spell your name right. Good night and good luck.

For many of us, family tradition or class background made the choice – be it Labour Party Young Socialists or Young Conservatives - more or less automatic. Then again, more than a few nice middle-class kids aligned with the left out of some sense of idealism, while plenty of what we used to call C2s and Ds happily went along for the loadsamoney ride.

What was for sure was that political alignment meant something. I’m not certain that if I was in my early twenties today, I would find such ideological distinctions as the partisans may discern between post-Blair New Labourism and the Cameroonies sufficient to merit getting particularly worked up about.

These days, political debate self-limits to an extended Coke versus Pepsi taste test, not questions of justice versus injustice. Let’s face it, unless you have a pecuniary interest in such esoterica, who can possibly get worked up about the finer nuances of local government finances or the small print of Capital Gains Tax arrangements?

What’s more, the trend towards depoliticisation appears to be long term. During the Wilson era, half the population expressed strong identification with a political party. Today that figure has fallen to one in seven.

While I’m not sure about the figures last time round, I do know that in 2001, not a single MP gained the votes of the majority of his or her electors. Again, some 12% of the population vote on who gets kicked out of the Big Brother house, yet turnout in some local government by-elections is below 10%.

Polly Toynbee – not a commentator who always meets with this blog’s approbation – cites some alarming statistics from the Hansard Society in her column today. Only 13% of voters describe themselves as ‘very interested’ in politics; only 51% are interested at all; and less than a quarter of 18-24 year-olds intend to vote at the next general election. Sadly, her proposed remedies are limited to tinkering with the electoral system. That’ll inspire mass political participation, Polly. Not.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for some of the other potential solutions doing the rounds, either. Bribes for voting – such as council tax rebates – seem such a retrograde step. Compulsory voting is unappealingly authoritarian.

I suppose it is also possible to argue that low turnout is not ‘bad for democracy’; it is democracy, in the sense of being the democratic expression of people’s indifference to all the parties on offer. It is effectively the only way of registering ‘none of the above’.

Yet the Angry Young Man argument that there are ‘no good, brave causes left’ is surely as wrong now as it was in the 1950s. Issues like the war on Iraq, skyrocketing social inequality, third world poverty and racism are there to inspire and, yes, divide.

The art of political leadership is to articulate these issues and translate gut sympathies into passionate political activism. Or, if that’s too much for these times, at least to convince most punters that they should be arsed to turn up at a polling booth.

OK, it’s not quite up there with the all-time greats such as ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. But the front page splash in this morning’s Daily Mail – headlined ‘Immigration: the great lies’ will probably be worth just as many votes to the racist right.

The article it accompanies purports to be objective coverage of a House of Lords economic affairs committee report on Britain’s immigration policy. But the hyperbole kicks in with the first par and just doesn’t let up.

‘Labour’s justification for mass immigration was torn to shreds by experts last night … landmark study … devastating cross-party report … ruthlessly exposed …forced to accept the social harm from migration, with little or nothing to fall back on.’

There’s plenty more where that came from in the editorial, too; the report ‘explodes a nuclear bomb beneath the government’s case …alas, it may already be too late to undo much of the damage.’

The Daily Telegraph plays the story with a straight bat. Unfortunately, its leader writers take it upon themselves to present us with ‘the brutal truth’, in language scarcely more temperate than that of its tabloid counterpart.

‘Labour’s immigration policy finally exposed,’ we are informed, without being told when it was ever supposedly hidden. The government, it seems, has ‘lost control of our borders’. I must have been imagining those long lines I thought I saw at passport control last time I passed through Heathrow.

‘As recently as the 2005 general election, the Conservatives were accused by Labour of “playing the race card” for raising concerns about immigration,’ the leader splutters indignantly.

That might just be because they did, of course. Here’s a direct quote from Tory MP Andrew Lansley: ‘Immigration, an issue we raised successfully in 1992 and again in the 1994 European election campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt.’ He evidently didn’t see the need to add that it plays particularly well in certain broadsheets, too.

None of this is to argue that such a major issue should be airbrushed out of public debate. Serious coverage of the controversy surrounding immigration is entirely legitimate. But taken in aggregate, articles such as those cited above have a huge impact on the climate in which the arguments are had out.

If the British National Party does find itself with a seat – or even two – in the London Assembly next month, then some journalists may just want to ponder the tone of what they write.

Meanwhile, politicians should have the courage of the neoliberal convictions they apply in all other instances. Either liberalisation maximises economic welfare or it doesn’t. If it does, governments should dismantle immigration controls with the same alacrity with which they once scrapped capital controls.

New Labour’s forthcoming immigration points system – and this, or something like it, is supported in principle by Respect Renewal’s only MP – effectively welcomes 25-year-old computer nerds, 30-year-old entrepreneurs and multimillionaires of any age into Britain.

But there is a lot of dirty work to do in this country. Those who want to do it should be allowed to live here legally and not be criminalised for their willingness to get their hands dirty. Even if they do not happen to be white.

There was something enjoyably subversive about supporting Ken Livingstone in the London Mayor contest eight years ago. Here was a man authentically popular with ordinary working Londoners, standing as an independent against New Labour.

For many on the left, it was a free kick against Blairism, a chance to register a protest vote against the government without having to back the Lib Dems, the Tories or some no hoper.

By way of full disclosure, I write this as one of the team that helped the London Socialist Alliance on its way towards the triumphant 27,073 ballot papers it secured in that particular election, a figure that probably represents the benchmark against which the SWP’s Left List should be judged this time round.

The 2008 campaign is now underway, with ‘Ken’ running against ‘Boris’ and some spliff-addled quasi-anarchist gay ex-copper insufficiently well known to go by given name alone, but representative of enough minority groups to have qualified for a substantial grant in the glory days of the Greater London Council, if only he had come out against the bomb.

Livingstone and I are both back in the Labour Party, with past indiscretions a spent conviction within the meaning of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and I will be canvassing and leafleting in his support. Yet somehow, the transgressive frisson of 2000 is nowhere to be found.

What I find even more disturbing is the incessant resort to first name terms, which is emblematic of not just depoliticisation, but dumbed down democracy. Given the ugliness of all three front runners, you couldn’t exactly call it a beauty contest, but you know what I mean.

They are essentially selling themselves as guys you could have a pint with - or perhaps a breakfast-time double Glenmorangie - rather than the bearers of competing visions for our capital.

It’s not that the candidates don’t differ on this point or that if you at the manifestoes hard enough. Yeah, I know Livingstone opposed the war on Iraq, and Johnson equates blacks with picanninies.

But in terms of the concrete policy proposals on offer, there isn’t clear blue water between the Tories and Labour, clear red water between Labour and the Tories, or clear yellow water (snigger, snigger) between Paddick and his rivals.

I’ve just seen my first Livingstone billboard, on one of those annoying automated hoardings that rotate three different advertisements. I had to wait until it came round three times before I spotted the (small) Labour logo in the top righthand corner. The pay-off line – ‘Vote for London’ – could mean anything. How exactly would it be possible to vote against the city in which one lives?

The upshot is that the biggest spat so far has been over which of the two main candidates is most strident in his opposition to bendy buses. And this just in; Boris has denounced knife crime. Controversial or what?

No wonder the result is going to be close. I guess this isn’t a coloured water kind of contest.

So in theory, it should be pleased with today’s High Court judgment that Blair acted unlawfully when, in 2006, he ordered the Serious Fraud Office to scrap a probe into BAE Systems’ dealings with the totalitarian monarchy; best business practice has been upheld in a manner that will hopefully act as a deterrent to further New Labour moral laxity.

Lord Justice Moses even hinted that Lord Goldsmith’s blatantly mendacious and self-serving invocation of the national interest in this affair amounted to interference with the course of justice.

If you live on a council estate in Dewsbury and are the mother of seven kids by five fathers, you can expect to find yourself in the dock for such misdemeanours. Unfortunately, the smart money is not on the erstwhile attorney general having to do the same.

The whole story of how BAE ended up as the chief supplier of lethal weaponry to what is unquestionably the planet’s most repressive regime speaks volumes about how the international arms trade works.

The Saudis would rather be buying American kit. But while Washington wants to keep the House of Saud onside – both because it is both the world’s number one oil supplier and because it is a key military ally – the impact of the Israel lobby makes it impossible for the government to ally US companies to oblige. BAE Systems gets the gig by default.

It is a lucrative contract, especially in terms of follow-up technical support. The Saudis are incapable of maintaining advanced weapons systems, and have to import the know-how.
The al Yamamah contract has been mired in corruption since its inception in the 1980s. New Labour are not the first government to simply shut up and play ball.

As long ago as 1989, the National Audit Office launched an inquiry into bribery allegations surrounding the deal. It took three years. So what was the outcome, you ask? We still don't know.

In March 1992, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee decided not to publish the NAO's findings. The chairman, Labour MP Robert Sheldon, refused even to disclose the report to committee members, assuring them that there was 'no evidence of fraud or corruption'.

Some Labour MPs expressed 'misgivings'. Martin O'Neill - then Labour's defence spokesman - pledged that a future Labour government would re-open the inquiry. But 11 years after Labour returned to office, that still hasn't happened.

In October 1994, Labour MP Tam Dalyell produced two documents - a US intelligence report and an internal British Aircraft Corporation memo - which claimed that Mark Thatcher, the son of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, received commission payments worth as much as £12m from al Yamamah.

But the PAC declined to investigate the matter, deeming it outside its remit, which is restricted to issues concerning taxpayers' money. The claims have never been refuted. And in the intervening years, we have certainly learned much about the ethical standards of the son of our former prime minister.

In 2005, Mark Thatcher was forced to leave South Africa after pleading guilty to involvement in a plot to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was fined $500,000 and given a four-year suspended sentence.

The biggest problem with today’s High Court ruling is that it is not retrospective. It is no good preaching transparency to developing countries while keeping corruption under wraps at home.

Why Labour repeatedly gets its knickers in a twist over taxation policy is entirely beyond me. I mean, correct me if I am being needlessly controversial here, but the basic principle underlying any left of centre take on this matter is simple enough; the more you earn, the more you owe the Inland Revenue.

This isn’t some kind of transitional demand; the idea that the rich should hand over a higher proportion of their income than the less well off has been a mainstay of the broadly progressive outlook since Lloyd George’s people’s budget of 1909.

Levying taxation on this basis has many advantages. Not the least of them is that, however much people grumble when they get their pay slip each month, it is widely perceived to be more or less fair.

It is only when you depart from this default position that you reach the situation where the super-rich do not pay a higher rate of tax than their domestics. In fact, by and large, they pay a lower one.

As a result, taxation has been responsible for getting New Labour getting into more than a few political scrapes over the last year or so, from the indecent haste in following up Tory calls for the abolition of inheritance tax to the cack-handed reform of CGT and the entire non-dom fiasco. All of this is effectively tantamount to one vast job creation scheme for already grossly overpaid tax avoidance lawyers.

Now the jinx has struck again. Brown’s decision to scrap the 10p in the pound income tax rate – a move that leaves up to five million of the poorest people in Britain worse off - has led to the rediscovery of ABC social democracy on the part of some backbenchers.

The move is apparently designed to fund a 2p cut in the basic rate. Yet there are plenty of other ways in which that aim could be achieved. Simply by scrapping taper relief on capital gains tax, for instance, the government could do even better and knock off 3p in the pound.

Indeed, it shouldn’t be beyond the Treasury’s specialists to devise some means of getting low earners out of the tax system altogether.

It turns out that Denis Healey never actually did utter the soundbite he is best known for today, namely a promise to ‘squeeze the rich until the pips squeak’. So why is Alistair Darling seemingly so determined to mete out just this kind of treatment to the poor?

Well, the stridently anti-Brussels neo-Poujadists in question have just secured a base in the House of Commons. Rightwinger Bob Spink (pictured), who recently lost the Conservative whip at Westminster, joins two Lords, ten euro-MPs, 55 or so councillors and a claimed 16,700 members in what is clearly Britain’s largest minor party.

This is the man who three years ago published a newspaper advert on immigration, under the headline: ‘What bit of “send them back” don't you understand Mr Blair?’ True, he didn’t preface the slogan with ‘If they’re black’. But for anyone who remembers the National Front catchphrase from the seventies, he didn’t have to.

Anti-immigration hard right outfits have had MPs before, of course. In 1976, disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse – on remand in Brixton after bizarrely faking his own death – became the English National Party’s sole parliamentarian.

Mr Spink, although by all accounts quite a colourful politician, is a more serious proposition. UKIP are reportedly confident that they can retain his Essex seat at the next general election. If Respect, the Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice Group and the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern can pull off victories against the mainstream party machines, that cannot be impossible. We shall see.

For some reason, UKIP is an outfit that the left - which habitually pays obsessive attention to developments in dozen-member microsects, the finer points of the Respect Renewal/Left List split and the chance of the British National Party securing representation in the Greater London Assembly – usually prefers to ignore.

That is odd, and possibly complacent. UKIP’s populist right platform has undeniable appeal to swathes of the electorate. The 2.7m votes it picked up in the 2004 euro contest illustrates that. As Cameron waters down or jettisons many Tory traditionalist shibboleths, that tally may yet grow.

In many ways, UKIP has the potential to act as a focus for the nationalist reaction in ways that the BNP cannot, because it is not tainted by fascist association. Precisely because it is constitutionally opposed to racial discrimination, and because it has fielded black and Asian electoral candidates, its opposition to immigration can be passed off as respectable.

It is not enough simply to write these guys off as the provisional wing of the Daily Mail any more. For more than a decade now, the hard left has talked (and talked and talked and talked and talked) about regroupment; the hard right has been getting on with the job, and is now a consolidated force in organised political life.

On top of denouncing its own readers as thick, the tabloid - which backed the Conservatives throughout the campaign - was in effect arguing that Rupert Murdoch gets the final say in who occupies 10 Downing Street.

Yet although this claim has entered political folklore, its veridical status is open to question. Hard psephological evidence that most people vote in accordance with the editorial line of the daily newspaper they read is somewhat scant.

Indeed, the majority of Sun readers voted Labour that year. Many, if not most, were presumably oblivious to contents of the leader column.

Nevertheless, New Labour made it an ostentatious priority to get the Murdoch press onside. In 1995, Tony Blair flew half way round the world to meet News International executives at a company conference in Australia.

It is widely believed that, in return for a promise of support from the Sun and neutrality from the Times, Britain’s prime minister in waiting committed his party to watering down previous policy commitments on media monopoly issues.

Murdoch’s operative maxim in deciding the political stance of his publications and television stations has long been ‘any colour you like, so long as it is going to win’. Opportunist? Maybe, but undeniably effective.

Just three years after the savage union busting operation at Wapping, Ken Livingstone was hired to write a regular column for The Sun, reportedly being well-rewarded for the task. As the then-MP for Brent East, he was happy enough to use the space to attack rivals on the left, notably the Socialist Workers’ Party.

That was then, and this is now. Yesterday, what is still Britain’s best-selling newspaper recommend Boris Johnson – sorry, I mean ‘Bozza’, of course - as the next major of London, rather its former contributor.

If Cameron looks like he will be forming the next government – and given his consistent lead in the opinion polls right now, he does look like he will be forming the next government – then the presumption has to be that the red top will soon revert to Tory form.

Livingstone – in 1981 branded an ‘IRA-loving, poof-loving Marxist’ by the Sunday Express – has much experience of negative press coverage. The Sun’s decision, while unhelpful, will not obviously prove decisive.

This time round it is the Evening Standard that really has damaged the Labour candidate’s re-election chances. Although technically a local publication, inside the M25 it carries more weight than any national title. Naturally, it is the only major newspaper that has covered the London elections in full detail. Much of what it has written about Livingstone borders on vendetta status.

Most of the articles in question come from the keyboard of Andrew Gilligan, one of the few old school investigative journalists still in business. Why Gilligan has decided to open sustained mortar fire, I have no idea. I used to know the guy professionally, and I am certain that he is neither a Tory nor a racist, as the Livingstone campaign has suggested.

One possibility is that he is simply delivering the copy that his editor wants to read; all journalists do that to some extent, at least if they wish to remain in employment. But my best guess is that Gilligan just likes causing trouble. Just because he can.

The real question is not persistent Tory media bias, but why the labour movement has no media counterweight. Back in the eighties, there was plenty of talk of the need for a serious leftwing newspaper, and even a half-arsed attempt to launch one, in the shape of News on Sunday.

In an era when nobody under 30 reads the dead tree press anyway, unless they are given a copy for free by a man or a woman clad in a purple polyester fleece, this is something that is now never likely to happen.

More colourful leftists, such as George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan, are sometimes able to make use of radio and television outlets. But they only have them on sufferance of media owners, and the platforms can be withdrawn as quickly as they are offered. Moreover, some may not see them as the ideal people to present our politics to the wider world.

So the wider problem remains as unresolved now as it was two decades ago. A serious left would make sure that it had a permanent new and old media presence that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of rich.

Two recent politic stories highlight just how rapidly remaining differences between the only two political parties in Britain capable of forming governments continue to erode. That can only be to the detriment of voter choice.

First off, we read that the Smith Institute - a thinktank linked with Gordon Brown - and the Centre for Social Justice - a thinktank linked with Iain Duncan Smith - are to publish a joint strategy on how to get children out of poverty.

As Guardian reporter Andrew Wintour notes, accurately enough: The joint initiative suggests the differences between the two parties are much smaller than they pretend.

Indeed, the whole exercise is being dressed up as an attempt to ‘take the issue out of party politics’. This, we are supposed to believe, cannot be other than a Good Thing. But is this necessarily the case?

Obviously one must await publication of the report before offering any assessment. But it seems inconceivable that it will come up with proposals that represent anything other than further ideological capitulation by Labour to centre-right ideas.

After all, it is not as if the Tories – who throughout their history have upheld but one unrelenting purpose, namely to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society - have become converted to anything even vaguely resembling social democracy.

Of course it is legitimate to argue about the relative merits of different anti-poverty approaches. But in acting in this cartel like manner, Labour and the Conservatives surely merit reference to the Office of Fair Trading. What they are doing is closing down the debate before it can evan be had.

Meanwhile, Ken Livingstone has promised that he will offer Boris Johnson a job in a Labour administration if he wins the London mayor election on Thursday, and will virtually train up his Conservative opponent for a second shot in 2012:

Certainly if I get elected this time, I will phone people up and say "I want you to come in and do this [job] for the benefit of London". If Boris doesn't win, I am not certain Cameron is ever going to put him in one of the great offices of state, so I suspect he will be back for another go. He would be a better mayor [for having worked in the administration].

I think Boris is a person of huge potential, but he's never been involved in detailed administration of anything. I would genuinely want Boris to come in, take a job and get some experience.

This, after building an entire campaign on painting Johnson as a rather nasty racist. I’m confused, Ken … who do I vote for if I want to see Johnson clear off back to Henley where he belongs, rather than sitting behind a desk at City Hall? Not you, it seems.

Gestures like this can only feed public cynicism, enhancing suspicions that the political class is a narrow clique that looks after its own through an all-inclusive popular front. Win or lose, Boris wins.

Such practices ape some of the worst aspects of US municipal politics. I’m still occasionally in touch with an old college buddy who is a leftwing Democrat with big time political ambitions.

He holds an important job in a major American city, which he got more or less as an explicit trade-off for withdrawing from a run for Congress and throwing the Irish vote behind the mayor’s preferred candidate. But at least that was a Democrat-Democrat in house transaction.

Livingstone’s enthusiasm for non-Labour forces has driven him to agreeing a vote transfer pact with the Greens and making remarks just short of a de facto endorsement of George Galloway’s bid for an assembly seat at the head of the Respect Renewal list:

I would like to think we could work together and [Galloway would] form part of a broad coalition with the Greens and us against the Tories and Islamophobes,

It looks like Livingstone is running his own mini version of the Big Tent strategy that has not worked particularly well for Brown.

Ironically, this is the man who once wrote a book with the title ‘If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish it’. It’s a shame to see him provide further confirmation.

Remember, at least three - or was it four? - Conservative MPs from the Thatcher period signed up with New Labour under Blair, with two of them picking up ministerial appointments in the process.

My guess is that no more will be coming over, and that the traffic will now be in the other direction. Funny how the one way street always seem to run from the party on the wane towards the party in the ascendancy, and never the other way round.

The early parliamentary ship jumpers are the opportunist canaries in the political coalmine, although instead of dropping dead, they get to chirp on merrily in their new home after the roof of the pit caves in on those they leave behind.

On behalf of ordinary local level activists of all affiliations everywhere, can I just request that these specimens spare us all the anguished soundbites about their gradual realisation that Party X now represents the continuity of the true political principles of Party Y, typically delivered with all the sincerity of a badly faked orgasm?

Obviously, people’s political analyses and prescription can alter over time; after all, the world alters over time. As John Maynard Keynes famously remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’

I have been a member of parties to the left of Labour as well as the Labour Party. But, in ideological terms, the apostasy involved is minimal. My belief system has actually changed little; it’s just that I now have rather different ideas about how it can best be enacted.

What, by contrast, can have been going on in the head of that councillor in Tower Hamlets who leapt the tall building that separates the Socialist Workers’ Party from the Tories in a single bound?

Fortunately, crossing the floor is rather rarer at Westminster than it is in municipal politics. But surely the day on which the first Blairite to see the Cameroonian light cannot be far away.

In its way, it will prove a fitting tribute to the way in which the politics cartel has rendered party identification almost meaningless.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith – a woman who has confessed to using cannabis as a student – has today confirmed that cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug.

The decision has been welcomed by the Conservative Party. As we know, Tory leader David Cameron was at the age of 15 confined to the grounds of Eton College for two weeks after being caught with a joint.

It comes just days after the election of Boris Johnson – a man who admits smoking ‘quite a few spliffs’ as a schoolboy and finding them ‘jolly nice’ – was elected mayor of London.

Former chancellor Norman Lamont has incredibly enough confessed to eating space cakes, while Alistair Darling, the man currently in charge of the Treasury, also knows what to do with three Rizlas and a ripped up cigarette packet.

Under the law as it stood at the time of these people’s youthful experimentation, and as it will now be again, all of them could theoretically have been sent to prison for five years for simple possession.

True, custodial sentences are rarely dealt out to young people nicked with a bag of grass about their person. But as ever with law and order issues, there is a class dimension to how the punishment operates.

When I was a working class teenager in the 1970s, my friends were regularly fined the equivalent of two to three weeks’ wages if the Old Bill found them in possession of small quantities of dope. That constitutes retribution qualitatively more severe than being ‘gated’ for a fortnight at Britain’s top public school.

Today, a caution is by far the most likely outcome in such cases. But as the Metropolitan Police’s own research discovered two years ago, in instances where charges are pressed, black people are disproportionately likely to find themselves in the dock.

In the view of experts such as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, there is no strong case for reclassification. What is more, with dozens of MPs of all persuasions on record as having used cannabis in the past, it can have little credibility with the public.

This is, in other words, New Labour gesture politics of a potency on a par with such legendary seventies marijuana variants as Thai Stick. In practical terms, reclassification will have no effect whatsoever.

The only proffered justification – advanced by the prime minister a few weeks back – is that it ‘sends a message’ to young people that cannabis use is ‘unacceptable’.

Teenagers, who rarely hold anyone over 40 in particularly high regard anyway, will draw a ‘message’ from this pronouncement, alright. But I suspect it will not be the one for which Gordon Brown is hoping.

Their rather more likely conclusion will be that middle aged white politicos who preach the virtues of doubling already hefty prison sentences for offences they themselves committed 20 or 30 years ago are a bunch of hypocritical old farts. In this, the youth of today might not be far wrong.

The charge sheets against the latter two can be summed up in one place name apiece; ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ respectively. Nothing that Major - pictured - has ever done in his life has been of that order of historic magnitude.

This guy didn’t cynically carve up Czechoslovakia, or even make a complete Horlicks of the invasion of a third rate third world dictatorship by not getting permission from Uncle Sam first. Here was a man who considered the national cones hotline to be the defining moment of his premiership, remember. But there were bungles aplenty.

There was Black Wednesday, for a start. Many commentators, especially on the eurosceptic right will never forgive him for Maastricht, although as a soft europhile myself I can’t really see where they are coming from.

Yet the malaise that surrounded the government during the Major years could not be attributed to one or two single issues, however weighty. The miasma of mediocrity was more pervasive than that.

The over-riding impression was one of a teacher out his depth, completely unable to control the naughty boys at the back of the class. The Bastards, the bonkers and the hardcore Thatcherite wrecking crew were accordingly given the run of the school. As the late Labour MP Tony Banks memorably quipped:

He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, ‘what on earth is councillor Major doing?’ I can't believe he’s here and sometimes I think he can’t either.

Of course, the BBC History rankings predate the time Gordon Brown finally got the set of keys Cherie reckons he constantly rattled over Tony’s head. So today I asking readers to comment on where they would insert the incumbent in the rankings.

It struck me this morning that there are certain parallels between the Major and Brown. Most obviously, both became unelected prime ministers after succeeding rather more charismatic predecessors who had won three elections on the trot. To be fair, the Tories were returned to office under Major’s leadership in 1992; it’s now looking doubtful whether Brown can repeat the trick for Labour.

Both give the appearance of being beleaguered PMs, holed up in a bunker and essentially powerless in the face of incoming flack. Brown has even acquired his own set of Bastards. Frank Field and friends now fulfill the same symbolic purpose as Teresa Gorman and that whackjob backbencher bloke from Northampton North, although they are mercifully not quite so obviously unhinged.

But there is one comparison that clearly doesn’t come out in Brown’s favour. In 1995, Major attempted to assert his authority – and the word is assert rather than reassert, because he never had much to begin with – by resigning the party leadership and inviting his critics to stand a candidate against him.

In the event, Major won by 218 votes to John Redwood’s 89, with 12 spoiled ballots and ten abstentions. The gambit didn’t quite work; even that margin was deemed unconvincing, and the removal vans were pulling up at Number Ten just two years later.

Would Brown – who, remember, secured the Labour leadership by coronation without putting his popularity to the test – have the guts to do the same? And would it make any difference if he did? Comments, please.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change.

Yeah, right. Such faux audacieux attempts to stake a claim to the traditional territory of one’s political rivals is getting so old hat, darlings. This kind of dumbed down 1994 vintage New Labourism in reverse is rapidly losing its power to shock. I’m bored already.

Nevertheless, I bet reading that ghost-written tripe ruined breakfast for many supporters of the rightwing Labour faction Progress, which brands itself as representing ‘Labour’s progressives’.

Meanwhile, the piece came on the very day that the Guardian published Ken Livingstone’s call for Labour to head a ‘progressive alliance’ including the Greens, and hinted that there was room for the Liberal Democrats on board at some point in the future.

Only after posting a critique this approach did I suddenly remember that Cameron offered those very same Lib Dems a ‘new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics’ just six months ago.

One presumes this has to be a ‘new progressive alliance’ to distinguish it from the old ‘progressive alliance’, a term coined by the Edwardians to describe the collaboration of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Liberals and those MPs ‘elected in the labour interest’ after 1906.

Meanwhile, former SDPer David Marquand, writing in the New Statesman in February, has described Gordon Brown’s early tentative overtures towards the Lib Dems as an attempt to construct – what else? – ‘a progressive alliance’.

If you are thoroughly confused by this point, that’s because you are meant to be. The obfuscation is 100% intended. The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change.

Yeah, right. Such faux audacieux attempts to stake a claim to the traditional territory of one’s political rivals is getting so old hat, darlings. This kind of dumbed down 1994 vintage New Labourism in reverse is rapidly losing its power to shock. I’m bored already.

Nevertheless, I bet reading that ghost-written tripe ruined breakfast for many supporters of the rightwing Labour faction Progress, which brands itself as representing ‘Labour’s progressives’.

Meanwhile, the piece came on the very day that the Guardian published Ken Livingstone’s call for Labour to head a ‘progressive alliance’ including the Greens, and hinted that there was room for the Liberal Democrats on board at some point in the future.

Only after posting a critique this approach did I suddenly remember that Cameron offered those very same Lib Dems a ‘new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics’ just six months ago.

One presumes this has to be a ‘new progressive alliance’ to distinguish it from the old ‘progressive alliance’, a term coined by the Edwardians to describe the collaboration of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Liberals and those MPs ‘elected in the labour interest’ after 1906.

Meanwhile, former SDPer David Marquand, writing in the New Statesman in February, has described Gordon Brown’s early tentative overtures towards the Lib Dems as an attempt to construct – what else? – ‘a progressive alliance’.

If you are thoroughly confused by this point, that’s because you are meant to be. The obfuscation is 100% intended. The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.

So, for instance, I have spent a fantastic weekend break at the Chicago blues festival and carried out a journalistic assignment in Cairo. But I have never been to Crewe, and have no knowledge of Nantwich, other than the fact that it forms the ‘and’ part of the constituency held by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody.

I was acquainted with the cantankerous old bat (pictured) professionally, in her role as chairman – woe betide anyone who called her as chairwoman or chair! – of the Commons transport committee, and liked her tremendously.

If anybody personified the difference between old skool Labour rightwinger and what New Labour has become, this was the lady. Although she is probably too busy giving St Peter a hard time to pay too much notice to the by-election campaign, I doubt she would be particularly surprised by the difficulty her daughter seems certain to have in retaining her erstwhile seat.

A telephone poll of 1,004 Crewe residents by ICM for The Mail on Sunday last weekend put the Conservatives on 43%, Labour on 39% and the Liberal Democrats on 16%. That would overturn Labour’s 7,078 majority in the 2005 General Election and instead hand the Tories a majority of more than 1,000. That would be the first Tory by-election gain from Labour in 26 years.

That – after the loss of London and a local government elections performance in which Labour came third, with its lowest share of the national vote since 1968 - would certainly make Cameron an even stronger favourite to become next prime minister than most bookies rate him already.

What of the constituency in question? As I say, I have never been there and inevitably, my opinion comes at a discount. But my understanding is that Crewe and Nantwich is essentially a quintessential northern working class town with a few bits of posh Cheshire tacked on. Until recently it was dominated by a railway works and a Rolls-Royce factory, although both are now closed.

This is archetypally the kind of place that stayed Labour right through the Thatcher ascendency. Although direct comparisons are impossible because of boundary changes, the town of Crewe itself has been permanently Labour since world war two.

If it changes hands next week, the only parallel that comes readily to mind is the Bermondsey by-election of 1983, where I was among the young activists canvassing for Peter Tatchell.

We lost that natural territory seat and, a quarter of a century later, we still haven’t won it back. The way things are going, Crewe and Nantwich could turn out to be the Bermondsey for the current Labour generation.

While I hate New Labour’s persistent use of the term ‘heartland vote’ as a euphemism for working class voters – it’s almost as if they are too contemptuous of ordinary people even to utter the plain English designation for their place in society – let’s go with the terminology this once.

It's not quite 'weight the vote'/'donkey with a red rosette' territory, but C&N can fairly be classified as a heartland seat. It is impossible to overstate how catastrophic defeat next Thursday will be for Labour. It would call into question not just New Labour’s arrogant insistence that the stupid proles have nowhere else to go, but the party’s ability ever to form a government again. Yes, it really is as serious as that.

Are there any Labour supporters reading this who are not already dreading Election Night Special 2010? Watching the forthcoming Tory landslide is going to be anything other than fun, as safe seat after safe seat turns blue on the television screen, and the arm of the swingometer shifts ever further to the right.

The Portillo moments in reverse will see sitting cabinet ministers and half-way decent backbenchers alike ejected by the electorate, in favour of identikit Tories with ‘privileged upbringing’ written all over their airbrushed PR mugshots and a few dozen more non-descript Lib Dems to boot. Think Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then double the gore quotient.

To cap it all, at some point towards the end of that second bottle of cabernet sauvignon, confirmation is likely to come in that the British National Party have secured fascist parliamentary representation for the first time since the second world war.

On the plus side for the wider left, the Greens may pick up a couple of constituencies as well, albeit at Labour’s expense. Perhaps a handful of Old Labour-style independents or progressive single issue campaigners will make the cut in working class heartland areas.

It is also not excluded that Respect Renewal will win one or two seats on its Muslim communalist ticket, on a programme featuring a handful of populist demands piggy-backing on an otherwise socially conservative outlook. But that will be difficult to portray such an eventuality as an advance for the left, and it may well act further to polarise British politics, both racially and religiously.

Just to make the hangover worse, socialists will wake up the following morning in the knowledge that 2010 was one of those elections – like 1979 or 1997 – that set the tone for a decade or more. The Conservatives can rightly expect two or three terms in office.

In one sense, Cameronism is likely to mean Blairism by other means, just as Blairism was in many important senses a continuation of Thatcherism. Any shift is unlikely to be dramatic; after all, the dirty work of smashing the labour movement, deindustrialising Britain and selling off every state asset not physically nailed to the floor is already largely complete.

But however much the packaging screams ‘new! progressive!’, the reality will be a reversion to a purer form of class-based rule. The Old Etonians will be back in town, no longer content to leave the running of its historical political instrument to jumped up shopkeeper’s daughters and provincial estate agents with ideas above their station.

When health secretary Nadine Dorries comes back with a second attempt to reduce abortion time limits, don’t put money on Respect Renewal MPs opposing the legislation.

Inside what is left of the Labour Party, there will inevitably be a post-mortem. Some will argue that New Labour ultimately failed because it moved too far to the right, others that its downfall resulted from an inability to move to the right far enough.

None of this is to predict a re-run of the years following Thatcher’s first win. The balance of forces inside the Labour Party isn’t right for that, nor is there a pool of potential entrists in waiting equivalent to the early middle-aged soixante huitards of the late seventies.

Both the Blairite Ultras and the residual hard left will remain small and isolated forces; the most likely development is a move towards some form of soft social democracy, within constraints acceptable to the trade union leadership, and propagated by a much reduced number of MPs.

Even if the far left outside of Labour gets its act together to a degree to which I do not believe it is capable, it will still require years - if not decades - of serious geographically-concentrated political work if it wishes to emulate even the limited successes of the Greens and far right. Minor parties need to cultivate bases.

And remember, if none of this reads like a very encouraging prospect for socialists, remember that we have largely our own dilettantism to blame.

I have pondered this issue myself without reaching a clear-cut conclusion, and Lindsey seems to be having some of the same difficulties. Perhaps the answer in this case really is ‘yes but no but yes’.

At one level, the direction of political motion seems indisputable. A rightwing Tory has ousted a leftwing incumbent in the capital’s city hall, while a paid-up fascist has secured a seat in the London Assembly. Meanwhile, we look to be less then two years away from a decade or more of Old Etonian Conservative government.

But as Lindsey points out, the situation is more complicated than it appears at first sight. Strip out the clichés and the commonplaces, not to mention some rather shaky excuses for picking up just a fraction of a percentage point in her most recent outing to the ballot box, and there is much here that borders on sensible analysis.

By virtue of the strange turns British politics has taken since 1994, the Tories have positioned themselves to pick up votes that New Labour has lost by turning away from Labourism. Weird, but there you have it.

The key point is that there has been no sudden marked change in the ideological climate. It cannot be said that the Tories have used their extended spell in opposition to articulate a coherent project and mobilise support in society around a master plan, in the manner of their predecessors 30 years ago. Voters who ‘back the other lot’ because they don’t like Brown are not positively endorsing Cameron, and thus not necessarily moving right in so doing.

Such shift as there has been is rather towards depoliticisation, as evidenced by the secular trend towards declining electoral turnout. Where young people do engage with politics – over the environment or third world poverty – the terms of debate are framed in such a manner as to preclude left-right axis thinking.

Thus Cameron can shlep around the Arctic by husky sled or slip off to Rwanda for an extended photo op, and promote policies on these issues that seem credible to many. Meanwhile, New Labour talks green, but caves in the second motorists get a bit uppity about paying more for petrol, or a Spanish conglomerate of origen Franquista demands an additional runway at Heathrow.

In the sphere of economics, public opinion has been TINAed to death. Widespread objection to certain market failures or negative externalities there may be, but not to capitalism itself. No well-known public figures articulate a rounded socialist alternative.

Accordingly, few voters give the matter of public ownership a second thought. The railway network may be a partial exception here, but as a positive demand, nationalisation is effectively dead, even within the labour movement.

Socially, gay rights are now irreversibly entrenched, to the point where even Tory MPs can register for civil partnership without feigned displays of moral outrage in the more prurient public prints. Likewise, overt racism is – in polite society, anyway – a distant memory.

But where opinion really does seem to be moving right is on immigration. Poll after poll indicates that many of immigrant stock – and even some immigrants themselves – buy the ‘Britain is full up’ argument.

What we are facing is not so much ‘a vacuum on the left’ that the left is automatically predestined to fill, to use a complacent and lazy generalisation advanced by far too many on the far left.

Rather more worryingly, we are up against a vacuum throughout politics, which some rather nasty forces are eyeing up with growing confidence.

How’s this as a possible scenario for the development of British politics over the next decade or two? Let’s say Brown holds off calling the next general election until the last possible moment, but is forced to go to the country in 2010.

The Tories waltz home in a landslide victory, with even the low IQ golf club pissheads that were only allowed to stand in theoretically unwinnable seats to make up numbers in former mining constituencies finding themselves duly elected with comfortable majorities.

And youth will be still in our faces when we cheer for an Eton crew. Thatcherism and Blairism find their continuity in the shape of a bunch of floppy-haired Smiths fans in open neck shirts, delivering touchy-feely petit bourgeois homiletics to mask policies that push the Gini Coefficient ever upwards. But that’s OK, because the poor no longer vote.

The Labour Party – reduced to around 50 seats - implodes. Even the present pitiful living dead existence it aspires to in many places instantly evaporates, leaving it without meaningful presence over large swathes of the country.

It may never be rebuilt, after its New Labour component throws its lot in with the equally emaciated ranks of the Lib Dems, on the impeccably logical grounds that sod all remains by way of political differences.

The left holds on to the brand name as a consolation prize, perhaps reaching a federalist lash-up deal with Trots, tankies and a few other sundry odd buggers, in a sort of Traditional Labour Movement Preservation Society that debars membership to anyone other than pot-bellied middle-aged real ale drinkers with beards. And that’s just the women.

As a result, the trade union bureaucracy becomes ever more supine. Industrial action becomes rarer and rarer and eventually peters out altogether. The more ‘realistic’ denizens of general secretaryland call for ‘dialogue’ with the Conservatives, on the grounds that they are going to be in office for a long, long time.

The British National Party makes serious inroads into the white working class, running a few councils and picking up a handful of MPs, while the Greens will mop up the Stoke Newington Church Street senior social worker vote that previously went to Labour.

Political Islamists cut to the chase and secure election in predominantly Muslim areas, on the back of a mosque-directed block vote and campaigns generously funded by business interests, dispensing with the already pointless intermediary services currently on offer from Galloway & Co.

Scotland dominates debate on the constitution after the Scottish National Party narrowly wins the independence referendum they are currently threatening, while Wales can’t particularly be arsed one way or the other so long as nobody scrutinises the expense accounts of those participating in that little sideshow in Cardiff too closely.

Me? I’ll probably emigrate to somewhere where life is more pleasant, political debate more open and living standards for ordinary folk somewhat higher. Like Belarus, for instance.

What do you reckon, comrades? Am I being a tad too pessimistic here? Well, show me where I am going wrong. Outline the alternative take, in which the party of which you are a member leads us to the sunlit uplands that naturally results from the application of your chosen ideology.

These people are sympathetic to their party’s values, as they understand them, of course. But they can’t really be arsed with policy details or any of that ideology stuff. A misguided sense of loyalty usually sees the credulous suckers parrot whatever half-baked nonsense their leadership is pushing that particular week.

Hey, and they tend to pay their subs by direct debit, too. The uncomplaining canvass fodder brigade are the ideal constituency level members of the early twenty-first century.

Then there are the kind of power-crazed individuals who actually get off on the adrenalin rush they derive from reckless factional in-fighting on the allotment allocation sub-committee of Chipping Sodbury town council, believing it to be condign preparation for Westminster. A high proportion of them are clinical psychopaths. Oddly enough, they too are little interested in ideology. That’s understandable enough; from their perspective, political consistency is not a virtue.

But the ones you have really got to watch are the geeks. That’s right, the ones who sit at home reading Marx, Mills or Hayek and pontificating about the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary politics on the internet. These are the dangerous obsessives that actually care about ideas.

Sadly for the wingnuts and moonbats of this world, politics today is more about focus groups and media manipulation than the devising and implementation of big ideas to change the world.

Yet for some reason, party leaders still feel the need to flirt with all that intellectual stuff, and even to get an –ism after their name. I can remember Blair toying with Will Hutton’s concept of the stakeholder society and even Amitai Etzioni’s communitarianism in his quest to define the Third Way.

Hence we have lately been treated to the spectacle of David Cameron, still doing his paint-by-numbers rendition of Blair circa 1995, establishing meaningful eye contact with the doctrine of libertarian paternalism, as developed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago.

You bet it’s fashionable right now; the Financial Times, the Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph have all ran articles on the topic of late.

The basic idea is that, rather than ban things, governments should drop hints about what they want people to do, thus steering people in the right direction. Hence DC’s recent spate of fatty-bashing in Glasgow, for instance.

I won’t be rushing out to buy a full-price copy of Nudge, the book in which the profs set out their stall, although I’ll probably snap it up when it inevitably ends up in a remainder bin in the not too distant future.

Why make a fuss about yet another vaguely interesting idea that doesn’t fit the accepted left-right framework? Sure, it’s entirely legitimate for a responsible government to run poster campaigns disparaging smoker or to encourage saving. But nobody ever said it wasn’t.

My bet is that ‘nudging’ will be around as a buzzword for a few months and then it will disappear to wherever it is that brief political fads go to die. As big ideas go, it is hardly up there was classical liberalism or the labour theory of value, is it?

I’m still trying to put my finger on what exactly so many people found so offensive about the Tory think tank ‘scrap Liverpool’ report on urban regeneration published yesterday. But at least it offers us a clear illustration of the mindset that dominates the intellectual wing of what is soon to be Britain’s governing party.

For the denizens of Hayekville, there really is no such thing as community. The authors cannot seem to fathom why anybody would want to stay in a place where they have lived all their lives, and can trace their family back generations, when they could simply head south and launch their own biotech start-up or qualify as a Chartered Financial Analyst instead.

Human beings are thus reduced to what Marx called ‘abstract labour’. Or, in neoclassical terms, they become nothing more than a simple factor of production that must subject itself to factor mobility if it is to reach market-clearing equilibrium.

One way or another, this has been a monumental own goal for the political right. Hopefully it will prove the first of many.

I’m sure the Decent Left of the day would somehow have found the moral clarity with which to oppose it; you know how the Euston Manifesto crew hate one party theocracies headed by dictators. Perhaps they called on the American colonies to mount humanitarian intervention.

But to tell the truth, I’ve always harboured a certain admiration for Oliver Cromwell (pictured). I probably shouldn’t admit this, but from time to time I have toyed with the idea of joining the Sealed Knot.

For those that haven’t heard of these people, this is a group of enthusiasts who like nothing better than spending their weekends dressing up in seventeenth century costumes, re-enacting the major battles of the conflict, and then having a beer afterwards.

I’m sufficiently sad to think that this sounds like fun, especially when you bear in mind that the good guys are pre-ordained to win.

Trouble is, all of this stuff happened 350 years ago. How has the class struggle fared in Britain since that time? Not brilliantly well, it has to said.

This thought struck me last night as I was reading a book about the revolutions of 1848, the mighty continent-wide wave of insurrections that were such a formative experience for the young Marx and Engels.

These uprisings took in almost every nation in Europe - even ultra-irenic Switzerland - and spread as far as Brazil. And in England? Well, the Chartists limited themselves to raising a petition in favour of a few reforms. A huge proportion of the signatures were false. Sound familiar?

Then they held a demonstration which marched around London for a few hours, after which they buggered off home peacefully. Ever wondered where John, Lindsey, and the Stop the War Coalition guys and gals find the precedents for their masterful grasp of tactics? Now you know.

Here’s another sorry parallel with today. The organisers insisted the demo was 300,000 strong. The government said only 15,000 were in attendance, while the Observer called the turnout at 50,000. Plus ça change, as they say.

Moving on a little, let us consider the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Loads of places witnessed the birth of huge working class-based communist parties. All we got was a poxy little Third International affiliate that struggled to build itself beyond the five figure mark.

In these decades, some countries even created mass anarchist trade union federations. Compared to the unbroken string of mediocrities that have headed the dear old TUC – from Walter Citrine to Brendan Barber – how cool is that?

Moving swiftly on, a few months back we were all treated to a relentless hippy nostalgia fest over 1968. But while the French students were building barricades and hurling cobblestones at the CRS, and their Czech counterparts bravely flung molotovs at Warsaw Pact tanks, sleepy London Town was just no place for a streetfighting man.

As far as I can make out, there was one sizeable demo outside the US embassy that featured a bit of a ruckus with the Old Bill, and that was that. The protestors spent the rest of the summer making love not war under the influence of mindbending hallucinogens while the Beatles and Hendrix played on the Dansette.

Come to think about it, the British instinct towards class compromise runs pretty deep. Take the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for instance. Sounds pretty militant, doesn’t it?

Until you realise that the gullible tossers were almost immediately bought off by meaningless promises by the King, who quickly reneged on them, rounded up the ringleaders and bumped them off. Apparently Jack Straw found all this sufficiently inspirational to name himself for one of the blokes who got beheaded.

The one saving grace here is that a breakaway faction – possibly the prototype for Red Action, if that lot are still going – did manage to storm the Tower of London and summarily slay all the rich bastards present.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from this sorry tale is that Britain doesn’t really do sustained class struggle. Perhaps the national stereotype is true; we really are just too polite sometimes.

IF YOU are a life peer and you lie about knocking off a call girl in Shepherd Market, you might just find yourself doing time, albeit many years after the event. Prostitute the House of Lords itself, and you are off the hook.

Compare and contrast the treatment meted out to Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare with the extraordinary leniency shown to Lords Truscott, Taylor of Blackburn, Snape, Moonie and Levy.

At this point, I need to take younger readers back to 1987, when Tory MP Jeffrey Archer sued the Daily Star for suggesting he had used the services of a hooker, and had then paid her £2,000 to quit the country. To this day, City Boys refer to the sum of two grand as ‘an Archer’, in jocular reference to that latter deed. The politician won the case, and was awarded £500,000.

As Mr Justice Caulfield famously observed in his summing up: ‘Is he [Archer] in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?’ Little did the judge suspect that the answer was very much ‘yes’.

Archer subsequently lost his seat, but John Major obviously could not do without him, and accordingly elevated him to the Lords. By 2000, he was sufficiently rehabilitated for the Conservatives to select him to run against Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral election. I seem to remember party leader William Hague praising him as a candidate of ‘probity and integrity’.

That was before two of his friends dobbed him in for the false alibi proffered 13 years previously. Archer did two years for perjury and perverting the course of justice before they let him out of HMP Hollesley Bay in 2003.

Now, trousering half a million quid of newspaper publisher’s money is clearly very naughty indeed, and Archer thoroughly deserved his spell behind bars. But at least his adventures in the land of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex took place in his own time. He was only on the job while he was off the job, so to speak.

The apparent willingness of Lord Truscott, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, Lord Moonie and Lord Snape to alter the law of the land in exchange for a bung is a matter of a different order altogether. From the evidence put together by the Sunday Times, it would seem clear to most of us that they have a case to answer.

Yet a statement from assistant commissioner John Yates yesterday revealed that Scotland Yard has considered a criminal investigation into the possible offences of bribery and misconduct in public office, but will not now proceed, after considering the prospects for obtaining evidence and whether an inquiry constituted the best use of police resources.

This, incidentally, is the same assistant commissioner Yates who led a lengthy inquiry into the ‘cash for honours’ allegations that Lord Levy and his associates offered peerages to party donors.

Ultimately, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that while peerages may have been given in exchange for loans, it could not find direct evidence that that had been agreed in advance, which would be required for a successful prosecution. Again, nobody was charged.

It only remains to point out that a decision not to proceed with criminal prosecutions in the two cases above is not quite the same thing as an exoneration of those involved. It would be interesting to hear what they would have to say for themselves under oath.

SHORT books can often attain maximum impact on world history for minimum wordcount. Perhaps that is why I admire great political pamphleteering - to some extent regardless of the cause advocated - above any other literary form.

The works I have in mind here are the likes of Marx and Engel’s ‘Communist Manifesto’, Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’, Herzl’s ‘The Jewish State’ and Qutb’s ‘Milestones’, all of which have been instrumental in shaping the opinions of millions of people.

Another volume that surely makes any such list is ‘Common Sense’ by Thomas Paine, first published in 1776, which changed what was until then an armed reformist struggle for a fairer deal from George III into an all-out war for American independence.

Shamefully, I only got round to reading it last night. I have to report being knocked out by possibly the most brilliant polemic I have ever come across. If you haven’t read it yourself, you really, really must.

Yet interestingly, trying to classify ‘Common Sense’ in terms of the contemporary usage of right and left somehow doesn’t quite work. Paine was a quintessential bourgeois revolutionary, and where present-day radicals will inevitably stress the anti-imperialist content of the text, rightists can just as legitimately see in it a call for small government. There are passages of which Paine’s contemporary Adam Smith would have approved. Such is the contradictory nature of populism in any age, I guess.

Reflecting on Paine’s little book has raised a number of questions for me. First, where are the great political pamphlets of the 2000s? Can they still be written at all, or is the art form now firmly dead? I mean, I dutifully plough through many of the offerings from the British left, SWP and Compass alike; much of such output is workmanlike at best, but happily destined to be forgotten before too long. Some efforts are truly abysmal.

Possibly the internet has done for political pamphleteering. I should just mention here that this blog - and I presume many others - is archived by the British Library, with my permission. Potentially anyway, it might form source material for future historians. I wonder what posterity will make of the blogosphere circa 2009? Will any blog post ever written amount to anything other than a footnote?

Second, how important is literary style? Recently I reread ’State and Revolution’ in the latest translation by Robert Service, said to be more faithful to the original than earlier editions available in English. Frankly, Lenin could have used a good editor; the entire structure of the book is rambling and repetitive, and the prose heavy going in may places.

Or perhaps such observations are unfair? It is impossible to judge, in a different culture and a different epoch, what the target audience of a political pamphlet will find inspiring. Surely their resonance is largely down to the way in which they address immediate political issues and so cannot be decontextualised.

Finally, the common denominator of the books listed above is that they incite change rather than prop up the status quo. Would it be possible to write an inspiring platform that could command mass attention on the basis of the platform of any current mainstream British party? Almost certainly not, which I suspect is an interesting conclusion in itself.

ON £700,000 a year and without the encumbrance of a job to attend to, I suppose Sir Fred Goodwin will easily be able to sort out the smashed windows at his home and the collateral damage to his Merc, inflicted this morning by a group calling itself Bank Bosses are Criminals.

This is what is known in leftist jargon as direct action; while it has caused limited damage to property, no one was harmed as a result. Some sections of the left are bound to be smirking, at least privately.

These days, even Financial Times columnists feel entirely comfortable cracking jokes about ‘shooting bankers’, they will point out. The tactic may not be commendable, but all things considered, Goodwin got off lightly.

With police chiefs predicting a summer of middle class riots as a result of the mess for which Sir Fred and his mates are responsible, even broadly apolitical people – especially the thousands of people Fred the Shred has put on the dole on recent years – will surely feel that the bastard had it coming.

As an email claiming responsability, sent from the address bankbossesarecriminals@mail.com, puts it:

We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning.

Such sentiments are readily understandable. But the five words that trouble me are ‘this is just the beginning’. If it’s legit to brick a window, why not firebomb some bankers’ upmarket pad while he is off on a ski-ing trip with the bit on the side? Why stop at firebombing? Why not make ‘em really suffer?

On past precedent, this mentality can develop a grizzly dynamic of its own. One has in mind here the 1977 abduction and subsequent murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, leader of the main German employers’ organisation and a former SS officer to boot, undertaken by the Rote Armee Fraktion. Remember, also, French group Action Directe’s killing of Georges Besse, head of Renault, in 1986.

At this point, the classical Marxist critique applies. Moves to undertake individualised reprisals against the nearest available fat cat, rather than patiently building a political response based on the organised working class, are ultimately counterproductive.

To bring about the sort of change that can address the misery that millions will endure in the years ahead, the necessity is build a political organisation committed to taking on capital in the interests of the working class.

Unfortunately, even the delicious sight of Sir Fred hanging from the nearest lamppost, strangulated by the entrails of Barclay’s boss Bob Diamond, would not take us any closer to that.

AT THE apex of the highly developed and still largely unassailable British class system - the social networks that centre on the landed aristocracy, the county set, the upper layers of the Church of England, the Bar, and the City, and officers serving in ‘good regiments’ - stands the royal family.

That must make Evan Harris’s private members’ bill, seeking to amend the Act of Settlement 1701, ever so slightly subversive. The consistently radical Lib Dem MP is seeking to end restrictions on those in line to the throne marrying Catholics, and to institute equal succession rights for royal daughters.

But the fact remains that the very existence of a caste of taxpayer-supported billionaires occupying the position of head of state in perpetuity is a standing affront to democratic or even basic meritocratic sentiment.

As Tom Paine observed 200 years ago, in reasoning upon which it is impossible to improve:

The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; as absurd as an hereditary poet laureate.

I suspect Harris - a man I would be tempted to vote for him if I lived in Oxford West and were not a Labour Party member - privately agrees, and has only tabled such a frankly feeble proposal in the expectation that it is the most with which he can hope to get away. But the move misses entirely the real issue, which is why an advanced country in the opening decade of the twenty-first century persists with a monarchy at all.

If the intention is chiefly been to ferment debate, then an opportunity has been missed. An out and out demand for a British republic would have served that purpose rather better.

HOW interesting that the ‘Jacqui Smith in hubby porn shame’ story was broken by the Sunday Express, of all papers. Here we have a seriously under-resourced publication, famously content to trawl the internet for Diana conspiracy theories and flimsy ‘parents did for little Maddie’ allegations, and then rehash them as the front page splash.

How did it manage to come up with the scoop of the week, then? Now, perhaps I am doing a disservice to a display of outstanding investigative legwork of the old school. But I somewhat suspect – and please forgive resort to a phrase that is unfortunate in the context – the involvement of a Deep Throat.

Since then, it has emerged that an unnamed City businessman is hawking CD-roms said to contain scans of every expense claim made by every MP for the past five years. The asking price – and remember, this information will be public in a matter of months, anyway – is £300,000.

After 20 years at the hack end of trade, entirely with publications that lack the resources to wave chequebooks, I have some experience of the circumstances in which people approach journalists with sensitive material.

Not infrequently, trade union officials and activists come forward with documents that embarrass companies with which they are in dispute. The other common category is those slighted, sacked, or otherwise stiffed by their boss. Unsurprisingly, they are generally former rather than current employees, and often happy to blab at great length over a jolly agreeable lunch.

The third principle variation on the theme is the brown envelope/anonymous hotmail account grass. Usually, you can read such communications and have a shrewd idea where such timid sources are coming from.

Finally, in circles way above my pay grade, a handful of leakers act on the basis of either ideology or morality. Sarah Tisdall and Clive Ponting represent emblematic examples from the Thatcher years.

In 2007, David Keogh, a Cabinet Office civil servant, and Leo O’Connor, research assistant to a Labour MP, were both jailed under the Official Secrets Act, after a memo purporting to record a discussion between Bush and Blair over plans to bomb Al Jazeera made its way into the Daily Mirror.

In November last year, Tory frontbencher Damian Green was arrested in connection with a leak inquiry, with the suggestion that he received inside information on immigration issues from civil servant Christopher Galley. While leftists may excoriate Galley’s agenda, in logic he must be entitled to the same public interest defence as Tisdall, Ponting and Keogh.

But is there anything to applaud when somebody seeks a six-figure sum for copies of a million documents, 99.99% of which are guaranteed to be entirely legit claims for return rail fares to Chipping Sodbury and the like? Surely nobody has been dumb enough to stick an evening with rent boys or illicit donations to Hamas on the Commons tab?

In this instance, the predictable objection that it is morally wrong to pay for ‘stolen’ information can be discounted. We are talking public money here, and it therefore there must be a right to public scrutiny.

But I think one can safely presume that the gentleman attempting to flog the disks is not motivated by righteous anger at Richard Timney’s indulgence in taxpayer-funded solitary vice, or any burning belief in the public’s right to know which MPs are abusing the second home allowance.

What could they possibly contain to make the would-be vendor confident that they are worth the kind of outlay he demands? Notably, several national newspapers have baulked at stumping up several hundred thousands pounds for the CDs, a sum that – at less than six months’ pension for Fred the Shred – is well within their budget.

Perhaps they fear legal repercussions. It may be that the information is simply not saleable. So here’s a suggestion to those in possession of it; why not upload everything onto a website and let all comers scrutinise the outlays of the political class? That is surely the best way forward for democratic leakers of the future.

IT IS usually found that the most articulate and convincing rightwingers have never been anything but out-and-out rightwingers. Such people - the native language speakers of conservatism, if you will - are those best equipped to deliver mellifluous little platoons of uninterrupted Burkean platitudes in an immaculate RP accent.

But somehow the ones that shout the loudest are often those who lack any birth right and whose youthful radical idealism has dialectically transfigured into its tired and reactionary opposite.

I am not here discussing the comfortable drift from the hard left to the right wing of the labour movement that has characterised the career of so many New Labour politicians. This is, in some sense at least, staying within the family. Nor do I have in mind those that adopt de facto neocon positions but still regard themselves as somehow ‘being on the left’.

Instead I wish to concentrate on those who undergo a definitive switch in tribal allegiance, in a manner that consciously transforms their political identity. Exemplars of this breed litter the chattering classes: think Peter Hitchens, Melanie Philips, Janet Daley, Roger Rosewell.

The are the English - or at least, the Anglos - who really have began to hate. What is more, they hate ‘the left’ as a generalised all-embracing category, stretching from the Socialist Workers’ Party to feminists and human rights activists, from George Galloway to Polly Toynbee. It is all the same to them.

In psychological terms, when they denounce these forces, they are really denouncing their earlier self. Accordingly, they tend not to reach a graceful reformist One Nation consciousness, but remain ideologues, with a Trot-acquired taste for searing factional polemic. In short, they become Monster Raving Loony Judeo-Christian morality-crazed free marketeers, eager to slag off even David Cameron as a reprobate socialist wuss.

The simplest explanation is genuine intellectual conversion, a belief that they traded up to a superior set of ideas, the intelligentsia’s equivalent of a trophy bride. But if it is the case that conservatism is the better overall credo, the turncoats must give satisfactory reason as to why they did not adopt that outlook in the first place.

Perhaps one obvious factor here is material incentive. The right defends the world view of the wealthy, and the rich are happy to support hacks capable of turning out justifications of their privilege. Well-remunerated sinecures on national newspapers and in think tanks and the academy are thus readily to be had.

But the worst thing that can be said of any intellectual is that he or she was willing to change ideas not in search of higher truth but for a tawdry bag of cash. If that is the sole explanation for going over to the Dark Side, it is surely unworthily craven behaviour on the part of any thinking person.

Middle age, of course, famously generates pressures towards conformism, but in my experience these do not operate on the level of ideas. True, nobody in my age bracket lucky enough to hold down a job that pays the mortgage and feeds the kids can pack it in to become low-wage campaigner. But that reality hardly necessitates a 180 degree shift in underlying political attitude.

Another downside of knocking on a bit, especially for those formerly adhering to a Leninist ‘big bang’ model of social change, is the growing realisation that simultaneous world revolution is rather unlikely to happen.

But the answer here is to abandon any notion of the inevitability of socialism in the teleological sense, while holding on to the realisation that unless there is a complete transformation of social relations within the next generation or two, that’s the end of the planet. Thus it is necessary to work to bring it about.

Or perhaps a shift right is more often simply a reversion to type, on the part of kids from a good bourgeois background, whose superficial Marxism was largely based on a rebellion against introjected parental authority and never extended much beyond the seminar room anyway.

It’s not that I don’t find the output of some ex-leftist rightists thought-provoking and it’s not that I cannot abide having my preconceptions challenged. But just for once I wish they would own up to the label they most deserve, which is that of renegade.

NINE formidable broadsheet pages in the Daily Telegraph this morning are devoted to forensic analysis of the expenses claims of cabinet members. Only the most diehard political anoraks will read every last line; this is hardly a subject of much intrinsic fascination.

The trouble is, the headlines alone are damning enough. Brown is paying his brother £6,000 for cleaning services; Straw got 100% reimbursement on a council tax bill he only paid 50% on; and Prezza scored a couple of loo seats on the taxpayer.

At one level, this is propaganda directed against Labour, and highly effective propaganda, too, coming as the culmination of months of revelations about spare bedrooms, bath plugs and cable television porno flicks.

I note that simply as a statement of fact; neither I nor any other Labour Party member can justly complain on this score. The Torygraph didn’t get its moniker for nothing, and it is completely within the rules for it to present a legitimate story to the partisan advantage of its party of choice.

So is a bit rich for Lord Mandelson – Peter Mandelson, of all people - suddenly to protest his heartfelt detestation of the evils of spin:

"When you see something like this in a paper like the Telegraph you can either react with sort of boiling anger at the attempt to smear or traduce half the cabinet and you should rail at what motivates a Tory supporting paper to mount an operation like this.

"Or you take it more philosophically, you accept that this is what passes for modern journalism – you don't allow yourself to be diverted from it as a minister and you get on with your day job, and that's what I intend to do."

But he does not challenge the documented facts, presumably because he cannot. At least Harriet Harman has the grace to say she understands why people are angry.

Yet even accepting - as I do - that the Telegraph is correct in principle to run the story, and has every entitlement to decide the presentation, an entirely unrelated article in the Financial Times this morning provides some worrying context.

There is recognition at the top of all three major parties that a new anti-politics mood is growing in this country, thanks to a sense of alienation from a political system that grants workable majorities to governments actively endorsed by just one in five of the people they govern, once abstention is factored into the figures.

For many people, the choice between being on the electoral register and avoiding council tax is a no brainer, especially as they cannot double the size of their council tax bill and then stick on their expense account, in the manner of the justice secretary.

After two decades of unconscionable fingers in the till behaviour from politicians of all parties, the ‘some day a real rain is gonna come’ climate is increasingly palpable, and no-one on the left should mistake it for mass radicalisation or a renewal of traditional class consciousness.

The material the Daily Telegraph published today will further feed this development. But there is no imputation of irresponsibility on the part of that publication. The blame lies entirely with the leadership of the party to which I belong, which provided the raw material for the copy.

Thanks at least in part to the incompetence of a left that has proven unable to root itself in the social layers it purports to represent, the new anti-politics can only find expression in either further depoliticisation if we are lucky, or a surge in support for the far right if we are not. One way or another, we will see next month.

THE junior partner in Japan’s governing coalition trades under a name that roughly translates as the New Clean Government Party. Reassuringly, they appear to be just as corrupt as every other bugger. But hey, nice name.

There would surely be a niche for such a brand within the British body politic right now, even if none of the existing organisations would have the chutzpah to claim the mantle.

Ongoing revelations on MPs expenses in the Daily Telegraph – which today turns its fire on the Lib Dems – have got me thinking about why it is that parliamentarians are remunerated in the first place.

We frequently hear the argument that the House of Commons is inhabited by 650-odd highly talented individuals, all of whom could be earning far more elsewhere. I’m not so sure of that; few achieved anything spectacular prior to entering professional politics,

The argument doesn’t stack up logically, anyway. I mean, not even the Fire Brigades Union – now led by my old Beffnal Green LPYS comrade Matt Wrack – sticks in a pay demand for £250,000 a year, on the grounds that its membership could easily be pulling down that kind of wedge if they had become tax lawyers instead.

And what’s more, being an MP is not a job like any other, such as shop assistant, school cook or trade press hack. Getting to make the laws under which we all must live is something of a privilege. If reward is the overwhelming consideration, aspirants should surely look elsewhere.

There are multiple applicants for every available seat. If wages were set by the market criteria that employers usually insist must apply to the rest of us, it is likely that they would be somewhat lower than they are now. The always excellent Chris Dillow argues the point with the precision that befits a trained economist here.

But the position of MP attracts a perfectly healthy middle-class salary for one good reason only, and that is to ensure that it can be held by any citizen able to win a plurality of voter support within a constituency, and not be held back by lack of financial support.

Before Lloyd George introduced payment of £400 a year in 1911, the job was essentially the preserve of the wealthy, opened up to Labour politicians only because of trade union sponsorship.

The call for MPs to be remunerated was a longstanding demand of the British left in the 19th century. In even formed demand number four in the six point People’s Charter of 1838, which proclaimed:

PAYMENT OF MEMBERS, thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the Country.

We pay MPs, in other words, to ensure that working class people can represent other working class people, and it took the work of generations of radicals for the argument to win through. But once the scale of the package on offer is such that it isolates MPs from the daily pressures that face the rest of us, the underlying principle is negated.

It is no surprise to find Tories or Lib Dems openly on the take. But when Labour politicians fiddle their exes to fund rug repairs, biscuits, bath plugs, silk cushions, tampons, chauffeurs and Tesco £3.49 Vino Collapso, they dishonour the better traditions of the labour movement, and even of democracy itself.

I DID used to watch That’s Life! on Saturday nights back in the 1970s, but only because my mother liked it, and as there was only one black and white telly in the house, that was more or less that.

Dad invariably went down the pub anyway, and I was safe in the knowledge that once I had sat through the talking dog that could say ‘sausages’, and Cyril Fletcher had once again left no entendre undoubled, mum would turn in.

I was then alone to watch Match of the Day, and if I was really, really lucky, there might be a late night foreign film on BBC Two. Sometimes they featured nanosecond glimpses of female toplessness, thus guaranteeing moral outrage from Mary Whitehouse and the approbation of the nation’s pubescent schoolboys in equal measure.

Since then, That’s Life! presenter Esther Rantzen has only sporadically impeded on my consciousness. I am aware that she has led some campaigns on child abuse and hospice care, for instance. Whether motivated by genuine concern, the desire for self-promotion, or a bit of both, I cannot say. But given recent appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity, she must stand summarily indicted of flat-out media tartdom.

Now the veteran television star wants to be an MP, and is intimating that she may run against hapless Blair Babe Margaret Moran in Luton South next year. Given public ire against Moran’s £22,000 claim for dry rot treatment on a house in 100 miles away from the constituency, the woman should be a shoo-in.

If not, the publicity will more then compensate for the campaign outlay. After all, a girl’s got to stay in the public eye if she wants to front another consumer affairs series, darlings.

Yet it is worth noting that Rantzen has said not one word about the positive policies on which she will seek to appeal to the electorate. She is defined by what she is against, and that appears to be enough.

This is pure V-sign politics; vote for the B-list celeb standing on the platform of platitudes, just to show what you think of the rest of the ‘em.

Some commentators suggest that a non-party party of ‘clean up politics’ independents could be a feature of the next parliament. Anybody know what Gaby Roslin’s up to these days? If the prediction bears out, the non-Labour left will have to work out how it relates to such campaigns.

We have seen precursors to Ms Rantzen in the last three elections. In 1997, Martin Bell – the Man in the White Suit himself – overturned a 20,000 Tory majority in Tatton to win by over 11,000 votes. He served one term, during which he rarely spoke in the Commons. Mostly he acted as a de facto adjunct of New Labourism, and when not, lined up with the Tories on the wrong side of issues such as gay rights and foxhunting.

Hospital doctor Richard Taylor has sat for Kidderminster since 2001, winning the seat on the single issue ticket of support for the local hospital. He is by all accounts an assiduous constituency MP, but that’s about all. Two Old Labourite independents have represented Blaenau Gwent since 2005. Incumbent Dai Davies does not exactly maintain a high profile.

Last time round, George Galloway was elected as a Respect candidate, although that formation cannot be considered a genuine political party, and his political style emploes many of the attributes of an outspoken independent. In contrast to Davies, he does keep a high profile, but seems not to be a meticulous Westminster attendee. Evaluations of the guy vary dramatically, as few readers will need telling.

All told, the track record of indies varies so greatly that generalisation is impossible. The far left will have to consider the candidates constituency by constituency. In some, they will judge Labour or Green candidates worthy of support, while individual sects will obviously advance their own surefire deposit losers in selected seats.

But what happens when a Daily Mail-endorsed populist runs against some rotten finger-in-the-till Blairite, with the Lib Dems and Tories providing the only other options? Some bloggers argue that the left should jump on the people’s power bandwagon, but I suspect that those who do will regret it sooner rather than later.

If Rantzen announces that her manifesto is based on the first four congresses of the Communist International and the Transitional Programme, I might just consider extending her critical support. Otherwise, to rewrite a 1970s slogan, vote Labour with gritted teeth.

DOES media coverage of MPs who claim for moat cleaning on their expenses even remotely compare with the sustained hounding of leftists in 1950s USA? Tory MP Nadine Dorries seems to think so..

In an interview on the Today Programme this morning, she maintained that her Westminster colleagues have become the victims of ‘a McCarthy-style witchhunt’. So let’s examine what this proposition entails in just a little more detail.

During the Red Scare that dominated American politics in the decade following world war two, the US Chamber of Commerce demanded that ‘all communists, fellow-travellers and dupes’ be barred from all jobs in newspapers, radio, television, book and magazine publishing, research institutions, schools libraries and manufacturing plants. Thirty states established loyalty oaths for teachers.

The House Un-American Activities Committee went to Hollywood to investigate Communist influence in the movie business, resulting in the blacklisting of 400 actors, writers, and directors.

All told, McCarthyism saw an estimated 12,000 people lose their jobs, sometimes spending decades out of work as a result. Hundreds were imprisoned on trumped up charges. Most were anything but hardcore cadre Stalinists; many were simply progressive liberals, and no more of a threat to the system than the inhabitants of Sir Peter Viggers’ duck island.

To cap it all, Congress - including future presidents John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon - passed the McCarran Act, which stripped Communists of US citizenship and authorised the establishment of concentration camps for political prisoners.

To squeal ’McCarthyism! McCarthyism!’ just because a few MPs have been made to repay money they wrongfully trousered, and a handful nearing retirement age anyway have been given a year’s notice of redundancy on a generous pension, is political illiteracy of the first water. Sorry, Nadine, but the parallel just doesn’t stack up. Good night and good luck.

I DON’T normally bother to join in so-called internet memes. Nevertheless, I have been tagged twice of late, so I'll make a rare exception. First off, nearly two weeks ago Rupa Huq canvassed my opinions about the late Labour leader John Smith on the 15th anniversary of his death on 12 May 1994. Here’s my slightly belated response:

Where were you when you heard John Smith had died?
Back in 1994, I was working for Tribune, the leftwing Labour weekly newspaper. In the week Smith died, editor Mark Seddon was on holiday, so I was in charge of putting the publication together. I remember getting a phone call breaking the news about Smith mid-morning. This was on the Tuesday, leaving me about 48 hours to plan and implement a total turnaround of the contents to reflect what was, for a paper like Tribune, the obvious big story.

I like to think I did a good job, especially with the front cover. I asked the printers to change the usual red masthead to black, as a mark of respect. What did shock me was the alacrity with which the Blair campaign got into gear. His supporters were obviously canvassing for his leadership candidacy by that very afternoon.

How did you view John Smith when he was leader and how do you view him now?
The last time I saw Smith was in the Strangers’ Bar at the House of Commons just before Christmas 1993. This is predominantly a backbench watering hole, and the leader had obviously come down to schmooze with the lads and one or two lasses. He put back two seriously large scotches in the time it took me to nurse a pint, and I remember thinking that was no way for a man who had already had one heart attack to be carrying on.

Wild-eyed Trot from beyond the lunatic fringe that I was at the time, I do remember writing a couple of articles seriously slating Smith for his rightwing politics and his dull and uninspiring demeanour. That judgement has to be seen in the context of the time; no-one knew then just how far Blair and Brown would push New Labour towards out and out neoliberalism.

Contrary to the post-1994 New Labour myth, a radical break with the past was in no way a precondition for electoral success. After Black Wednesday, the Tories were so tainted that Labour would have had no difficulty at all in winning on an identifiably social democratic platform. Fifteen years after his death, Smith essentially goes down as perhaps the last Labour leader to adhere to the tenets of plain vanilla social democracy.

Do you think he would have made a good Prime Minister?
He would certainly have made a less worse prime minister than Major, Blair or Brown. In the final analysis, all governments under capitalism act in the interests of the ruling class. There is nothing of which I can conceive Smith doing that would have represented the least challenge to the establishment. But just maybe he would have avoided some of the more crass and even stupid decisions of New Labour, which have succeeded in alienating a base of support that took generations to build.

What do you think is his lasting legacy?
Unfortunately, the Labour Party Smith led has been systematically dismantled. 1994 was New Labour’s Year Zero; nothing was ever the same again.

I tag ... anybody who would like to join in, I guess. Meanwhile, Obnoxio the Clown is pushing the‘eight pointless things’ meme, in which bloggers are invited to unveil eight pointless things about themselves. He wonders if this is ‘beneath the dignity of a Marxist’. Well, yes, frankly. But hey, it’s a bank holiday:

Eight pointless things
(1) Being in the Labour Party
(2) I once failed auditions for the guitar job with both Generation X and Adam and the Ants
(3) I really, really hate it when people with fully-laden shopping trollies use the basket only checkout at the supermarket
(4) The worst country I have ever visited is Saudi Arabia, which appears to have no redeeming features whatsoever
(5) The CD on my deck right now is ‘Bird: The Original Recordings of Charlie Parker‘, featuring Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Red Rodney, Thelonius Monk and Lester Young
(6) One of the reasons that the youngest of Daddy’s Little Princesses is called Hannah is in honour of Hannah Arendt
(7) In the 1990s, I participated in chess tournaments sufficiently frequently to secure an {admittedly lowly] British Chess Federation rating
(8) When getting dressed in the morning, I always do my best to ensure that the colour of my socks co-ordinates with the colour of my shirt

TURNING points in British political life have to the point of cliché been conceptualised as ‘swings of the pendulum’. The idea has been that the Labour Party represents the left and the Conservative Party the right – much as that proposition pains the ideologically-minded – and once every generation or so, popular outlook switches sides for an extended period.

But what happens when cross-dressing diminishes the space between the major parties, all now arguably coalescent on the right of public opinion, to a degree that no longer leaves sufficient space for the necessary oscillation? At this point, the model breaks down, in much the same manner as the Phillips Curve after the first oil shock, with consequences we shall only know in the years ahead.

Conventionally, the Labour landslide of 1945 is attributed to radicalisation engendered by the second world war, which legitimated state direction of the economy and generated a demand for greater equality after the sacrifices working people made in the common interest.

Similarly, 1979 is said to mark a rejection of post-war social democracy and Keynesian economics, and widespread intellectual acceptance of free market policies as the only possible restorative for the sick man of Europe.

And 1997 is characterised as a backlash against ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcherite greed, backhanders to backbenchers in plain brown envelopes and the National Cones Hotline, a policy initiative younger readers may care to google up for their own amusement.

All these elections are invariably portrayed as agenda-setting for three or four governments to come. True, the Tories regained Westminster in 1951. But according to the schema, they nevertheless governed within the tramlines established by Attlee.

Sure, it is possible to mount a coherent challenge to any or all the scenarios set out above; they are by their nature thumbnail sketches. But as a broad analytical framework, such ideas not without explanatory power.

At issue is whether they provide many pointer to the future. Even as a Labour Party member, I am well aware that it is futile to deny that Labour is comprehensively discredited by the recession and the expenses scandal. Anger at the government is palpable. Thus the expectation should be one of paradigm shift, along the lines of 1945, 1979 or 1997.

The only trouble is, the Tories do not offer an intellectually distinct paradigm. All major parties now think essentially in terms of neoclassical economics, moralistic social policy, spurious justifications for ever-greater encroachment on civil liberty, and ridiculously overblown pretensions about Britain’s role in international affairs.

Then they wrap up the resultant concoction in care bear platitudes on the environment and lip service to anti-racism, feminism and gay rights, and try to sell the job lot as an ideologically neutral and class conflict-free ‘progressive consensus’.

The electorate will vote Tory in huge numbers at the next general election, but only on the negative grounds that the Conservative Party is not the Labour Party. The issues at stake will be not job creation or the future of the welfare state, but retribution for dry rot refurbishment and ostentatious duck islands. Thus the pendulum of ideological politics has effectively been stilled.

Had the left spent the period since the advent of Blairism building a credible organisation offering a radical alternative prospectus, it could reasonably hope to benefit from this development.

But we all know that its stupidity and sectarianism present an insuperable obstacle to achieving that. This, frankly, is the chief reason why the BNP is about the get its first euro-MPs while the left challenge – and what an unfunny joke the very word ‘challenge’ represents in this context - comes split between four contending no hope slates.

What happens next? One penalty for political incoherence is the B-list celebrification of the British polity, where any do-gooder with the benefit of television exposure or a few airport novels under his or her belt is suddenly seen as a credible elected representative. The risk is that where Esther Rantzen leads, the latter-day equivalents of Pierre Poujade may soon enough follow.

EVEN for the hardcore anoraks among us, euroelections mark the most shambolic twice a decade non-event of the entire political calendar. True, low turnouts and the use of proportional representation mean that smaller parties get a rare chance to make a mark, a factor much appreciated by activists in sundry posturing fringe outfits. But for most people, the contest matters even less than the outcome of the county council votes staged at the same time.

Such alienation understandably flows from an appreciation that the European Parliament has little power; the European Commission, which has far too much, remains resolutely unelected. This is so widely understood that even the populace of countries that fought hard for the institution of liberal democracy only two decades ago does not see much point in participation.

Essentially, there are two ways the left can approach this situation. The first is the traditional denunciation of the EU as a ‘bosses’ club’, usually accompanied by a demand for British withdrawal. This is pretty much the methodology on offer from both No2EU and the Socialist Labour Party next week.

But let’s be honest, comrades; the tactic has not worked spectacularly well so far, has it? Think about this point when you are totting up those lost deposits on June 5th. There is evidently little future in setting ourselves up as the auxiliary arm of UKIP.

Alternatively, we could start from recognition that socialists in principle favour the closest voluntary unity of peoples, in the biggest possible state units. Remember that the ‘United Socialist States of Europe’ slogan boasts impeccable Leninist credentials.

Of course there is much that is reactionary about the EU, not least its constitutionally entrenched neoliberalism and a pervasive Fortress Europe mentality. But it has progressive aspects as well.

In today’s Europe, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a good thing. The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united democratic Europe.

It is this that excites the ire of the stupid right and generates a steady stream of deranged ranting against some non-existent conspiracy to bring about a European socialist superstate.

Instead of echoing these attacks on what are real achievements, why not begin from a call to extend EU democracy dramatically? Rather than pledge not to sit in Strasbourg - in the highly unlikely event of securing enough support to get there in the first place - why not fight for a European parliament with real powers in place of the unaccountable bureaucracy?

Would it not be to our advantage to have a sizeable contingent of hard left MEPs pushing for the leveling up of the social wage, union rights and working hours across the continent?

I admit to not having checked every minor party manifesto to establish this point. But as far as I know, nobody is offering people like me the chance to back this political stance next Thursday. That is a pity.

IT SEEMS surprising that John Wick - the former SAS man and Tory supporter who grassed up Westminster to the wider world - took many weeks to find a buyer for a disk containing a run down of all parliamentary expense claims going back several years. After all, this is material that Telegraph hacks have been easily able to transmute into an inexhaustible supply of front page splash gold dust.

Despite Wick’s protestations that he was essentially acting in the public interest, he initially tried to secure £300,000 for the info, at which price there were no takers. Nobody is quite sure how much the newspaper ultimately forked out, but the lobby correspondent rumour mill suggests a sum of around £70,000. Isn’t it nice when principle and pecuniary gain just happen to coincide like that?

For its part, the government - which often lists Britain’s laughably ineffectual Freedom of Information Act as an example of one of its more progressive policies - did all it could to keep everything under wraps. All the punters were due to get were a heavily edited version, and some way down the line at that.

Socialists will have few qualms about MPs being brought to book, and will thoroughly enjoy watching the big league politicos squirm. Those of us in jobs in which we are reimbursed for out-of-pocket air, train and taxi fares and restaurant and hotel bills legitimately accrued in the course of our employment accept that expense account arrangements are, in principle, fair enough.

But by the same token, we are aware that fiddling your exes is quite literally a sacking offence. Do it big time, and the plods will be invited to take an interest. In short, an expense account is not a means of securing a major augmentation of the salary set down in your employment contract.

Moreover, it is a basic socialist principle - albeit one that some star-struck revolutionary organisations have lightly tossed aside of late - that political and union representatives be paid no more than those they represent.

The point is that the way in which these matters came to light underlines the depth to which the British political system is addicted to state secrecy. It is unacceptable that electors are only in the know thanks to some ageing reactionary touting the skinny round the capitalist press in the hope of trousering tens of thousands of pounds himself.

Maximum transparency when it comes to the financial affairs of those holding public office should be axiomatic for the left. Until it is, all boasts about FoIA are pretty much worthless.

READERS of Dave's Part tend to be a pretty opinionated bunch. So here's your chance to demonstrate just how incisive your own particular brand of soberly perspicacious political analysis can be. Let's be having your predictions ahead of the announcement of the euroelection results tomorrow night.

Will the Labour Party get more or less than 20%? Will it finish ahead of or behind UKIP? How many euro-MPs will the BNP secure? What about the Greens? And can you guess No2EU's share of the vote, to the nearest tenth of a percent? Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is all yours.

REMEMBER the factional disarray that beset Conservative governments in the early 1990s, as Labour supporters gleefully watched the Major administrations unravel before our very eyes?

I can’t help being struck by the parallels between the political climate then and now. Except that this time round, Labour is the butt of the joke and it is the Tories that require a continuous supply of dry underwear.

One obvious comparison is the state of the UK economy, which had undergone serious turbulence in the preceding two years, as a result of the unconstrained financial markets that Thatcherism deified and the Labourism of the period still half-heartedly contemplated reining in.

The nation was outraged that a handful of Conservative backbenchers had pocketed bungs in plain brown paper envelopes for tabling parliamentary questions, although the furore was as nothing compared to the apoplexy generated by the expenses crisis.

Red top kiss ‘n’ tell activity reached the level of a minor cottage industry, with tales of Juanita Maneater’s improbable feats of athleticism with ministers clad in Chelsea shirts, knocked-up local councillors, and bed-sharing on holidays in France to ‘save on hotel bills’ generating widespread moral indignity, most of it entirely feigned.

There has been nothing like it until earlier this year, when the News of the World published those pictures of Nigel ‘Babe Magnet’ Griffiths in flagrante delicto drunkenly chasing some leggy chick in stockings round the office sofa.

The impression – which, as a Labour-supporting journalist, I naturally did my utmost to propagate – was of a fag-end government going through the motions until the electorate could administer the necessary coup de grace.

So it was that even before the 1994 euroelections, everyone knew Labour was on course for a massive victory in the general election that was to come. Yet somehow the outcome of the contest served to confirm the prognosis, just as last night’s results offers a pointer to the impending return of the Conservatives.

To recap, 15 years ago, the first major electoral outing for New Labour under the leadership of Tony Blair saw the party secure 43%, a far cry from the nugatory 16% it scored last night.

The Tories got 27%, a share only fractionally less than the 28% that has enabled it to emerge as the most popular party this time round. That was considered a disastrous showing as the time.

The Lib Dems were on 16%, again in the same ball park as their performance last Thursday. UKIP hardly registered, with a laughable 1%, and the main far right challenger, the National Front, managed just 0.1% for its five candidates.

On the evidence of last night, Cameron is not building anything like the same base of positive support that Blair was able to create. But then he doesn’t have to, because the collapse of the governing party is all the more comprehensive. If only Brown had done as well as Major managed at the equivalent juncture, he wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

On the ideological level, it is worth pointing out that an absolutely majority of voters last night voted for parties of the right. The aggregate tally for the Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP comes in a shade over 50%.

Within that figure, we see that one Briton in five of those that can be bothered to turn out voted either for a reactionary rightist formation or an out-and-out fascist organisation.

So much for the argument that economic downturn is generally a harbinger of leftist revival. From our point of view, the 2010s looks distinctly worrying.

THREE news stories from the last fortnight or so have really brought home to me the extent of the current disconnect between the establishment and the rest of the population of the United Kingdom.

First came the initial announcement that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war would be held being closed doors. Yes, I know the government rapidly had to backtrack on this one. But how could Gordon Brown have possibly imagined that the level of secrecy he wished to ensure would be acceptable to the public, not least the one million and more of us who participated in the big anti-war demo in February 2003?

Then came publication of heavily censored – sorry, I meant to say ‘redacted’ – details of MP expenses claims, weeks after the Daily Telegraph had filled its pages for days on end with the most damaging information it could extract from this raw material. Too little, too late.

Did the parliamentary authorities have the foggiest idea how evasive, tokenistic and half-hearted this made the entire exercise look? If all we get to see is thousands of chainstore receipts defaced beyond recognition by marker pen, when the press has already delivered up all the juicy bits anyway, the abiding impression is not one of disclosure. Instead, we are inevitably left with the idea that these guys have got something to hide.

Finally, there was the little matter of the all-but-£10m package that Royal Bank of Scotland has deemed necessary to ‘incentivise’ chief executive Stephen Hester.

Pick me up if I am missing something here, but isn’t RBS a financial sector basket case that is 70% owned by the taxpayer, and therefore a nationalised industry in all but name?

Has UK Financial Investments – the government body that controls ‘our’ stakes in several leading banks – stopped to think how word of Hester’s remuneration package will play with Honda staff forced to go onto short time, or BA employees being asked to work a month without pay?

In the normal run of events, perhaps none of these three matters would excite more than passing resignation. But when they come thick and fast like this, the voters are going to start to notice.

Such is the extent of Labour’s complicity and the left’s impotence that the chief beneficiary can only be the populist right.

BOTH the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have been quick off the mark to offer their condolences to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. Never mind that most of the people who fall into these categories will have no idea who these creepy limey guys are anyway; what I want to know is why politicians feel the need to have an opinion on the death of an American pop star in the first place.

I mean, I can just about see why comment is called for in the event of a national disaster on the scale of Aberfan or Hillsborough. It is probably appropriate to issue a few lines of tribute on the demise of a prominent politician of one’s own party, although I expect Brown and Cameron will strive to out-do each other in nauseating eulogy, encomium and panegyric when Thatch finally kicks the bucket.

But why come out one way or the other on Michael Jackson? I know the guy’s fans tend to be pretty dedicated. But can there really be anybody on any electoral register anywhere in Britain whose vote at the next election depends on what party leaders have to say about Wacko Jacko?

All of this puts me in mind of the time New Labour spindoctors sort to convince the nation that the Brown listens to the Foo Fighters and the Arctic Monkeys during his early morning workouts. It later transpired that the contents of his iPod are rather more bland, tending towards the Beatles and popular classics.

I loved that Guido Fawkes post that included footage purporting to be a long-haired Cameron at a rave somewhere off the M25, circa 1988. But while the Tories insisted that this was a case of mistaken identity, Cameron’s image makers did set up a photoshoot of their man posing outside Salford Lads’ Club, in emulation of a Smiths album cover. Even Conservatives are allowed to like dad rock these days.

Given what we know of the two men’s musical tastes, I’d put money on the proposition that neither of them ever attended a Jackson gig. The likelihood is that neither ever owned any Jackson music on vinyl or CD, either. A simple ‘no comment’ from their respective press offices would have been rather more dignified.

IN THE bad old days of not that long ago, single trade unions controlled constituency parties in dozens of Labour strongholds. Secure the nomination from the NUM or the GMB, and you had a seat for life, son.

Such practices were undemocratic, obviously conducive to machine politics, and invariably worked to the disadvantage of lefties. But in a rough and ready way, it at least it resulted a cohort of Labour MPs with some sort of demographic resemblance to their electoral base.

I expect parallel mechanisms – not least the dogged independence of local Conservative Associations from Central Office – helped gentlemen farmers, estate agents, former army officers and decent chaps with the right connections find their way to Westminster in no small number. Not exactly equal ops in action, I guess, but it also meant that Tories of such ilk were anchored in their communities.

But the Britain that produced these cosy little set ups is no longer there. There are very few one industry company towns or orderly semi-detached middle class suburbs remaining, and both parties have felt the need to appeal beyond the social layers in the interest of which they once saw themselves as being in politics to propagate.

The solution – so we were told – was to attract fresh candidates to replace all those trade union timeservers and Sir Tufton Buftons, who had to make way for people more reflective of the make-up of the wider population.

Right up until the 1980s, for instance, there was not a single black, Asian or openly gay MP in parliament, while the number of women MPs was pitiful. Hence the advent of all women shortlists for Labour and A-list candidacies for the Tories.

But have these schemes delivered the goods? For all the much trumpeted efforts to broaden the intake at Westminster, in class terms our MPs are perhaps less representative than at any time since the Representation of the People Act gave Britain universal suffrage in 1918.

True, there are more women and there are more blacks. But on the whole they are posh birds or the kind of people Linton Kwesi Johnson dismissed as black petit bourgeois. One of the many reasons that politicians of all parties misread the public mind over the expenses scandal so badly is the increasingly selective circles from which they are drawn.

Nor is this situation set to get any better. According to new research compiled by communications consultancy the Madano Partnership, a full one-third of new MPs elected next year will be from private schools.

With the return of the Old Etonians, even the Tories are becoming more public schoolie than they have been for several decades. Among Conservatives, privately educated MPs will number close to 50% of the new boys and girls.

Yet private schools educate just 7% of school age children, a figure that would have been somewhat lower when this crop of politicians were growing up.

"The overall trends of the figures do suggest there has been massive shift over the last 12 years towards the private and independent sector," the Madano report says. It is further evidence that after 12 years of New Labour in office, Britain has become more unequal rather than less.

A private education, of course, confers a lifetime advantage on those who get it. It massively boosts chances of access to top universities and thus access to top jobs. Yet Britain’s little privilege factories continue to enjoy tax free status, thanks to their nominal standing as ‘charities’.

In a democracy, there are no viable means of imposing any cap or quota on who gets elected. That is as it should be. But the upshot is that the background of Labour MPs is now more and not less socially narrow than when Andy Cunningham ran Tyneside as if it were Tammany Hall, while the Tories are about to put an OE into Number Ten for the first time since the 14th Earl of Home. That is simply not progress.

TRACEY ‘Chipolata’ Temple and Petronella Wyatt - supreme seductresses both - may have been given to leaving thrillingly risqué verbal billets-doux on the voicemail systems of the deputy prime minister and the future mayor of London.

But if the messages I get on my mobile are anything to go by, the News of the World hacks charged with listening to the private communications of thousands of celebs and politicians over an unspecified period must have had a stultifyingly dull job.

‘Nick here mate, coming out for a beer? Give us a ring, mate’. ‘Mr Osler, Acme picture framing. Just to let you know poster you brought in last week is ready for collection.’ Routine bollockings from the boss, a political meeting cancellation or two, short notice requests from Evil Former Partner to look after the kids. Maybe I just don’t get out enough.

I would not, of course, condone NoTW naughtiness. If they have broken the law, throw the book at them. But I do think politicians have got a brass nerve complaining about any invasion of privacy involved. The Murdoch red top is no match for the British state, which bugs thousands of telephones. Every single week.

The situation is outlined in a report published last year by Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of Communications Commissioner. The document revealed that in the last nine months of 2006, there were 253,557 applications to intercept private communications under surveillance laws, and most of them were nodded through.

In that period 122 local authorities sought to obtain people's private communications in more than 1,600 cases. That’s right, local authorities. What heinous crimes could they have been seeking to tackle? Illegal fly tipping?

Incidentally, Sir Paul - a senior judge with access to secret intelligence material - reported 1,088 incidents where public bodies broke the rules on surveillance operations.

Just in case readers want to brand the above yet another egregious example of New Labour’s incipient police state, let me point out that the 1985 Interception of Communications Act – hey, it only missed 1984 by a single year! – is a Tory creation.

Among the organisations specifically targeted under Conservative governments were civil rights group Liberty and its Irish counterparts, British Irish Rights Watch and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled that these organisations’ rights to privacy were systematically breached by interception of their communications between 1990 and 1997, while John Major was in Number Ten.

Sure, there are plenty of cases – serious crime and acts of terrorism spring to mind - when it will be right for the state to tap phones. But that kind of stuff doesn’t happen a quarter of a million times a year.

MOST people initially get involved in politics not out of any desire to blag duck islands or pay-per-view adult movies at taxpayer expense, but because they have a vision of the good society, and are genuinely idealistic enough to want to bring the vision about.

Activism is almost always healthier when premised on ideological commitment rather than personal advancement. Problems normally set in when positions offering power, remuneration, or both, are at stake. Only then do we get the spectacle of people knifing each other to secure factional advantage on the allotment allocation subcommittee.

The trouble is - as two stories in the news today underline – politics is increasingly becoming a career choice rather than a crusade. Don’t get me wrong; I have in the past done politics for a living, and I appreciate the need for a full-time apparatus to make things happen.

But the danger in current trends is exemplified by a woman I know who proudly admits to having worked for both the main centre-left party and the main centre-right party in her country of origin. She reckons she’s a bit of a leftie herself, but hey, a girl might as well work for the best payer, right?

It is difficult to estimate how many people in Britain are formally involved in politics right now, although the number has evidently fallen fast in recent decades. According to easily google-able estimates, membership of the Conservative Party is around 290,000, while there are 200,000 people signed up to Labour, and 70,000 to the Liberal Democrats. By my maths, that makes 560,000 in the three main parties.

The big three are not the only choices, of course. The Scottish National Party has 15,000 paying subs, and there are said to be 10,000 in the British National Party, 6,000 in the Socialist Workers’ Party, 2,000 in the Socialist Party and 1,000 or so in the Communist Party of Britain.

I could equally trawl the internet for figures for UKIP, the Greens, the Liberal Party, Plaid Cymru, parties based in the North of Ireland, and all the rest, but I don’t have time.

Let’s go for round numbers. My guess is 90,000 covers absolutely everybody else, including non-affiliated odds and sods such as independent councillors. Feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong.

That gives us 650,000 people concerned enough to sign up to a party. But as we all know, most of them will be members on paper alone. On a generous assumption, about half could be called political activists, if that designation implies actual activity.

In other words, given an adult population of 50,893,318, just 0.6% of us are sufficiently committed to push for their worldview in an organised manner. If you are a political activist, you are by definition an oddball.

Now consider this report from BBC journo Michael Crick, who numbers the British political class at 29,000 people on the public payroll. Throw in party staffers, full-time trade union officials, NGO merchants and miscellaneous quangocrats, and it is a safe bet that one in ten political activists earns a living through political activism. That proportion strikes me as higher than would be ideal.

Now check out this article from the Financial Times, which appears under the self-explanatory headline ‘Lobbyists in “desperate” scramble for Tory insiders’. Friends of Dave can virtually name their price, it seems:

Tory officials are being offered double or triple their salaries to move to the private sector, jumping “from five figures to six figures pay for top people”, say industry insiders.

I’m not suggesting that Conservatives are any more venal than New Labourites were circa 1996. My point is rather six figure salaries have got something of a tendency to knock any residual traces of Bennism or classical liberalism or whatever it is out of a young idealist, and reduce them to just another suit doing corporate bidding. It is probably not how most of them thought they would end up.

TWELVE months to the day since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is starting to look horribly like the bankers of the world are not only entirely unchastened but, well, laughing all the way to the bank.

The City and Wall Street are currently telling themselves that they have gotten away with the most monumental con trick in the history of political economy. Not even pausing for penance or reflection after a three-decade party came crashing to a halt, they simply got the state to clean up the beer cans strewn all over the floor and the overflowing ashtrays, and have now kicked off festivities all over again.

Governments the world over have meekly acquiesced in sustaining rapacity. Lectures will inevitably prove ineffectual. Obama can urge ‘common sense’ all he likes; this is about the one commodity to which the average investment bank has no exposure.

In this country, a new dividing line has appeared between New Labour and the Tories, with the voters to be asked to choose between caring cuts and nasty cuts. As a Labour Party member, I can only urge readers and voters to back the guys who will chop schools and hospitals with reluctance rather than with gusto; I suspect it is going to be a hard sell on the doorstep.

Nobody in the political mainstream questions the idea that reducing real services for real people for the next 20 years is unavoidable if the state is to recoup its outlay on saving capitalism’s skin. So who will articulate the sense of grievance that must and therefore will accumulate in the face of such patent injustice?

True, the world economy does look tentatively poised for some sort of recovery. Economists and others debate its shape - which they variously liken to a V, U, W or even the square root symbol - but the consensus is that things are on the mend. An increasing number of countries are now technically out of recession.

Some commentators still inject a note of caution, arguing that the massive fiscal stimulus applied to OECD economies over the past year is in the nature of an economic ‘sugar rush’, which will wear off in short order. The neoclassical argument is that inflation will ensue; the rest of us will be keeping our fingers crossed that Keynesianism was the right approach.

But a rapid return to the champagne years – champagne years for some, anyway - seems unlikely. Any reading of the last 12 months that goes beyond superficial concentration on the undoubted excesses of the financial sector points to structural issues in the world economy that will have to be rectified.

In particular, the economic perpetual motion machine represented by low-wage China’s ability to lend the US the money to buy its goods will be difficult to put back together on the same scale.

What has not kicked in yet is public anger. The mood has been largely one of quiescence. Keep you head down, at least you’ve got a job. Even if UK GDP has turned the corner, unemployment is continuing to rise, and the pain may drag on for years.

Factor in a government – Labour or Tory – actively out to reduce aggregate demand and introduce sharp reductions in public services even as the City Boys are out there largin’ it, and you have a recipe for social tension.

Predictions from Scotland Yard chiefs earlier this year of ‘a summer of rage’, complete with middle class riots, proved somewhat wide of the mark. Now TUC general secretary Brendan Barber – not a man much given to alarmism – has invoked the memory of Toxteth, predicting that the inner city poor will institute a 1981 revival. Maybe. But why should the rich care if the ghetto get thrashed?

The real danger is that New Labour and the Conservatives will speak as one in insisting that this is the way things have to be, while a marginalised far left retains a level of popularity that has left Britain with quite literally more practicising Satanists than organised socialists. When a brand of politics becomes less popular than Devil worship, its adherents really should get the hint.

That opens the way for a populist hard right on a small state platform that can juggle banker-bashing rhetoric with attacks on benefit scrounging chav scum and opposition to immigration, in line with the wider mood.

Imagine a Daily Mail editorial writ large as manifesto, and you have one direction in which British politics could head after 2010. Whether the scenario comes about or not, it is quite clear that the political consequences of the bank bailout have yet to play themselves out.

‘WE ARE all socialists now,’ Liberal chancellor Sir William Harcourt famously maintained on the introduction of death duty in 1894. The soundbite was resurrected earlier this year when Newsweek took a pop at Obama’s ostensible leftism.

For the last century, politicians have routinely reworked the phrase. Thus Tricky Dicky insisted ‘we are all Keynesians now’ - although it seems Milton Friedman actually said it first - while Peter Mandelson deliberately offended Labour sensibilities when he claimed ‘we are all Thatcherites now’. Mandy can speak for himself.

The current crop of British politicians are now offering a new twist to the theme. These days, it seems that it is compulsory to be a progressive.

Hence Nick Clegg’s conference speech, in which he asserted that the Lib Dems have supplanted Labour as Britain’s main progressive party.

But hang on a mo’. Cameron’s appeall to the Lib Dem base in yesterday’s Observer mentions the P-word seven times in the space of a short op-ed. Tories are progressives too, he stressed.

On the Labour side, Jon Cruddas wants Labour to adopt a ‘progressive policy agenda’, while Ken Livingstone wants to see a ‘new progressive alliance’.

The end result is to render the term meaningless and 100% content free. This is not good enough. After all, nobody nowadays is going to put their hand up and admit to being a reactionary.

All politicians who resort to this appalling mumbo-jumbo catchphrase as a shorthand description of their principles should be forced to explain in depth exactly what they mean by it..

C’mon guys, tell us what you stand for. The public deserves better than evasion by buzzword.

POLICE officers and prison workers are already banned from becoming members of the British National Party. Now the government is considering the addition of the teaching profession to a growing list of jobs covered by Britain’s slowly expanding backdoor Berufsverbot

But should the left support the introduction of a softly-softly version of the German system, which forbids members of all organisations deemed by the state to be extremist from holding public sector employment?

Is such legislation somehow OK if it applies to sensitive positions only, keeping the fash out of the classrooms and the cop shops while still allowing them to Sieg Heil to their heart’s content while emptying our wheelie bins?

Or perhaps all this is no skin off our nose if such restrictions apply to the far right alone, while exempting Trot social workers and local government officers?

It’s a difficult question with good arguments on both sides. But on balance, I am uneasy about the wisdom of the policy.

The most obvious objection is a basic point of civil liberties. If a political party is legal, then a liberal democracy has no business restricting the employment prospects open to its adherents.

Supporters of a ban ask how a child facing racism in the playground could possibly turn to a BNP teacher for help. But this is simply a microcosm of what is set to become a society-wide issue.

If you were an Asian family facing constant racist abuse from a gang of sink estate thugs, would you turn to a BNP councillor for help? Would you lobby your friendly fascist London Assembly member or MEP for assistance with your plans to build an Afro-Caribbean community centre or a new mosque?

These difficulties will be exacerbated when the BNP secures Westminster representation, as it soon undoubtedly will. Now that the far right has an electoral base numbering hundreds of thousands of voters, these are genuine problems than cannot be ignored by the tokenistic targeting of individual supporters.

Any ban would amount to bespoke legislation designed to tackle a problem of minor proportions. The list of BNP members published on the internet last year contained the names of just 15 teachers.

If the object is to stamp out racism in the classroom – and that is entirely laudable – then it has to be recognised that racist sentiment is not the sole province of the BNP. Is it admissible for an Islamist believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to teach Jewish children, for instance? Why not legislate against that eventuality, too?

What about UKIP teachers? What about the Conservative Party’s grassroots golf club bigot tendency? And yes, I have even come across unpleasantly racist people in the Labour Party.

Moreover, any ban based on organisational affiliation would be almost impossible effectively to police. Who decides which parties and factions are blacklisted? Fringe political groupings come and go, and cliques of Hitler worshippers form and disband with clockwork regularity.

How will the rules deal with a fascist teacher who isn’t in the BNP and signs up with some newly-formed whackjob six member neo-Nazi outfit that nobody has ever heard of instead? What about cases where people sidestep the regulations by not taking out a party card, but otherwise think and act just as a BNP member would?

But the biggest danger of all is that the BNP revels in portraying itself as the outsiders that the Establishment is desperate to silence because it ‘tells the truth’. Feeding that narrative is a sure way to enhance the racist right’s popular support.

In short, discipline racist teachers for racist words or deeds; disciplining them for their politics alone would be a serious mistake.

OFFICIALLY, the proposals are known as ‘Future Shape’. But the unofficial designation ‘easyCouncil’ better spells out just what Tory plans to re-run 1980s-style local government cuts under a pseudo-funky nickname will mean for users of local authority services.

Barnet leader Mike Freer - a Conservative parliamentary hopeful, natch - openly admits that the Ryanair business model is his inspiration for slicing town hall expenditure by £15m over the next 18 months. Other Tory councils, from Coventry to Hammersmith & Fulham, are watching closely.

Predictably, the rightwing press is bigging the whole thing up. ‘Book me a seat on low-cost easyCouncil’, enthuses Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph this morning. He even goes on to mull the prospect of easyGovernment.

But what if local authorities really were run like bmibaby, as the British Midland subsidiary preposterously styles itself? Please step inside the Dave’s Part time machine on a trip to the May 2010 London local government contest, as we follow Mr Freer’s speaker car:

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. On behalf of my crew, I’d like to welcome you on board this easyCouncil flight from Burnt Oak to East Finchley, via London Luton airport.

‘There is no smoking allowed anywhere in this local authority, which is just as well really, given that fire brigade coverage is minimal.’

Nine hours later:

'We thank you for choosing to fly easyCouncil today and wish you a pleasant onwards journey. We hope to see you again in four years time.’

It’s only when you get off the plane that you realise that the wheelie bins have ended up in Walthamstow, after handling was outsourced to a private sector firm.

Hey, but at least the flight was cheap.

MY SOLE brush with publicly-funded office was the three terms I spent as external affairs vice president of City of London Polytechnic in 1983-84. But even experience that gives me one more democratic mandate than Baroness Ashton of Upholland has ever enjoyed.

Several newspapers this morning make much of the fact that the EU’s new high representative for foreign and security policy has never been elected to anything, and in this instance, they are right to do so. What they are highlighting is the wider issue of the EU’s massive democratic deficit.

Unlike the unthinking europhobes of both right and left, I start from the assumption that closer European integration is a good thing. The more I read about nineteenth and twentieth century history, and the enormous bloodshed that stemmed from petty squabbles between nation-states, the more confirmed I become in that view.

But it must surely be indefensible for appointments to key positions to be made over a jolly good – and almost certainly well-lubricated – dinner. Given that the entire public sector and most large private companies these days routinely append recruitment ads with the words ‘we are striving to be an equal opportunities employer’, the practice cannot be justified.

The way in which matters were handled reeks of a narrow elite looking after its own. At the very least, the £268,000 a year job should be subject to ratification and possible veto by the European Parliament.

The second aspect of this whole affair that sits poorly with me is Baroness A’s insistence that she is ‘the best person for the job’. How does she make that out? She has no obviously qualifications whatsoever.

Again, I have an extra-mural diploma in international relations. That is one more qualification than Ashton has in this field. Otherwise, her CV consists of stints with CND, the Social Work Training Council, Business in the Community, Hertfordshire Health Authority, the National Council for One Parent Families, various ministerial offices after her appointment to the House of Lords, and finally a year in Brussels.

All worthy posts, no doubt. But how do any of them set this woman up to sort out, say, a renewed outbreak of conflict in Bosnia or to mastermind Europe’s contribution to resolving the crisis in Darfur? In short, they don’t. She is a foreign policy lightweight.

If Brussels was setting out purposely to design a means of making its project look even more unappealing to the average European citizen then it already does, they could not have bettered what they achieved yesterday.

SERIOUS political debate – in the sense of well-argued clashes between sharply opposing viewpoints – has been on the decline in this country since it was stifled by ideological consensus at some point in the 1980s.

The key problem is that once all sides share all the same essential premises, it becomes increasingly harder to achieve product differentiation. The rhetoric becomes ever more consensual, because underlying political anger cannot any longer be sustained.

So ignore the hype surrounding the three promised Brown/Cameron/Clegg talking heads shows coming to all major networks next year. Not only are the programmes unlikely to galvanise public interest in the electoral process, they may ultimately benefit the parties that like to present themselves as the radical alternative to the establishment

It is a cliché of current punditry that Labour has bought into the Thatcherite settlement on free markets, while the Tories have adopted centre-left positions on social issues and on private morality, and the Lib Dems seek out distinctive niches in this broadly centre-right ecosphere.

At the level of values, there is a lot in that generalisation. That is not to say that there are not differences of substance, especially in the crucial field of macroeconomics. For instance, Brown has fought the recession by deploying Keynesianism for the wealthy, stripped of any social democratic content.

While such measures get few socialist pulses racing, they remain preferable to anything the Old Etonians are likely to come up with. Watch what will happen to GDP once the wingnuts return to the Treasury, and you will soon find yourself nostalgic for good old 0.2% a quarter falls.

The trouble is, party leaders cannot use the forthcoming head to heads to discuss the economy in terms that will be intelligible to only a small proportion of the population. Instead, everything will boil down to a Dutch auction on who cuts what, and by how much.

Once, politicians in this country sought electoral backing on the basis of how many jobs they were going to create and how much they planned to boost public services. It is a clear sign of just how far extremist free market ideas have gained intellectual ascendancy that the three main party leaders will be slugging it out in terms of how hard they intend to wield the axe. How do you want your progressive austerity, love? Fried or boiled?

On every issue of consequence - from the European Union to nuclear weapons, from the environment to immigration, the disagreements are those of degree rather than principle, and the likelihood is that this will not go unnoticed out there in Viewerland. Consensus politics means one thing in Westminster, and quite another in Workington.

OK, I’m a North London middle class leftie. What do I know? If I could somehow be teleported into a sitting room in Rochdale, I might find myself pleasantly surprised at just how well somebody who has just lost their job at the callcentre accepts the logic that the interests of the City must come first at all times.

There might be surprising reservoirs of heartfelt support out there for the Lisbon Treaty, which has doubtlessly been dissected in terms of both positive and negative aspects in workies’ clubs across the land, and endorsed so overwhelmingly that a referendum is deemed superfluous.

But my suspicion is that there are large numbers of issues that find the great unwashed not yet with the programme. If the debates boil down to a 90-minute Brown, Cameron and Clegg agree-a-thon, they will be more willing to consider the other options on the ballot paper.

The left is in no position to offer a credible electoral alternative. That will offer an obvious opening for political forces who can convincingly talk in terms of populist solutions and readymade scapegoats. In one sense, the British National Party and UKIP will be on the platform, even if they are not.

MATHEMATICIAN and scientist Dr Simon Singh - the man getting sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association after writing about their particular brand of 'alternative medicine' - will find himself in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday. The case will be heard by three of the most powerful legal figures in the UK, namely Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley.

Given my own impending appointment with Mr Justice Eady over a 2007 post concerning Baader-Meinhof suspect turned Tower Hamlets Tory activist Johanna Kaschke, I am extremely pleased to be one of the speakers at a solidarity meeting for Simon in London tomorrow night.

Also on the bill is consultant cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst, who faces a libel action after criticising research by US company NMT Medical, in what is a test case for the freedom of scientists to engage in academic debate.

The other guest is Dr Ben Goldacre, author of the 'Bad Science' column in the Guardian, who successfully fought off a libel action from a vitamin manufacturer who promoted his pills to AIDS sufferers in South African townships.

I have over the years shared platforms with many luminaries of the left and the labour movement, including Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Peter Tatchell and Arthur Scargill. I have even addressed a 20,000-strong demo in Istanbul, made of up of angry Turkish ultraleftists raging at the state-directed murder of one of their comrades. But this gathering will be more daunting than even those rallies, not least because I will be the only bleedin' thicko without a PhD.

The event kicks off on Monday night at 7.00pm, at the Monk Exchange pub in Strutton Ground, SW1. Nearest tube: Victoria. It's two quid to get in. I'd love it if any Dave's Part readers are able to get along. Wanna see four guys bricking it at the prospect of being homeless and bankrupt? This is the place to be.

ONE-LEGGED Lithuanian lesbians, David Cameron joked in 2007, should not be in receipt of Arts Council grants. On what grounds they might be deemed intrinsically more or less deserving than heterosexual Estonian bipeds, he didn’t say.

But clearly the Old Etonian element among leading Tories has got something of a downer on amputees. Hence Boris Johnson’s column in the Daily Telegraph this morning, in which he merrily compares Gordon Brown’s chances of winning the next election with the prospects enjoyed by a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

Boom, boom. Still, at least the Nasty Party now no longer feels compelled to go in for autopilot gay-bashing and mockery of the disabled simultaneously. In their terms, that’s probably progress.

Readers will know that I’m the last person to swoon like a crudely-propositioned Victorian maiden the moment I hear a mildly politically incorrect wisecrack. My only objection to BoJo’s gag is that it is not particularly funny.

If you really want to learn how to sock it to the raspberry ripples properly, go and listen to Scottish stand-up Jerry Sadowitz do his Heather Mills routine. At least that has genuine satirical edge.

Otherwise, the London mayor’s main contention still stands. Despite what looks like a rogue poll over the weekend, putting the gap between the two main parties at just two percentage points, few of the political betting public consider the chances of an outright Labour victory worth a flutter.

That said, the lead enjoyed by the Conservative Party is falling fast, and the Tories damn well know it. Two years ago, especially after the loss of the Glasgow East by-election, I honestly believed that Labour was sleepwalking towards a defeat of 1931 proportions.

Instead, we are looking at a common or garden election loss on a scale from which recovery will be possible in years rather than decades. That, under the circumstances, almost qualifies as a result.

Meanwhile, might I just leave de Pfeffel with this 2003 headline from the BBC News website? It reads: Mt Cameroon tamed by one-legged man.