Cicero's Songs

Unlike many in my own party, I remain utterly unreconciled to the majority of the political positions that Jeremy Corbyn has taken in his long and hitherto undistinguished career.  I think that virtually all of his foreign policy positions are not merely mistaken but actively dangerous. Most of his economic ideas are wholly wrong and would fail if enacted. So the fact that on some constitutional positions he is closer to the Liberal Democrats than to his own party does not- and should not- leave most of our party particularly enthusiastic.  Yet the monstering that the new Labour leader has received in the press is too much, too soon. Even though the selection of the Shadow Cabinet was amateur night in the circus and the relations between the Leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition and the media have clearly begun with, shall we say, a degree of hostility, I think that the media, especially the right wing press, may be overplaying their hand. The fact is that the sh...

In a world where we still struggle to redress the wrongs done to women, both historic wrongs and present ones, it can sometimes seem that to praise the assumed masculine virtues is still -somehow- to denigrate women. The masculine stereotypes are deconstructed and criticised to the point that it is sometimes hard to remember that just as there are specific virtues to the feminine so there are specific virtues to the masculine. In a world where words have become weapons even stating such a commonplace carries the risks of hostility, even- sometimes- of vilification. The battle of the sexes may end in a hard fought draw- as indeed it must- but in such areas as public breast feeding, for example, many battles are still to be found even in supposedly equal societies. Personally I find it bizarre that anyone could object to a mother feeding her child and those who demonstrate hostility to mothers who make that choice seem to me to be both discourteous and even rather strange. Perhaps I ...

One way analysts have chosen to examine the dysfunctional political system of Russia is as a "power vertical" where closely linked economic and political interests share out the spoils of the economy. Like all models it is a simplification, but it has sometimes explained events that make no other sense. As the Russian forces in Ukraine have increased their hostile activity- the latest being a renewed offensive against Mariupol- there is now increasing evidence that the power vertical is less united than it has been for sometime. As I noted a few days ago, the campaigning season in Ukraine is getting short, and with only a few weeks left there is great pressure on the Kremlin to break the deadlock before further help can get to the Ukrainian armed forces and the balance of power turns more strongly against the invaders. What is true for the military may also be true for Russia's internal politics. The announcement that Yakunin may be running for the Federation Council s...

The increase in fighting in Eastern Ukraine is reaching levels not seen for some time. The pressure on the Putin regime is now significant. Essentially even a frozen conflict outcome will look like a defeat for the Kremlin, so the heat is on to find a solution that puts more of the region under Russian control and allows the illegal statelets that Russia has created a more sustainable future. To that end, the Russian state authorities are cracking down on their local satraps and imposing increasingly direct rule from Moscow- de facto annexation. However, in an attempt to create either a viable entity, or better still, the breakout that gives Russia the land bridge to Crimea they still clearly seek, the Russian armed forces are facing stiffer resistance from the Ukrainians than they expected. This is a problem, because if they can not break though before October then the contrary winds against them will probably force a significant change in direction. Rumours swirl that Putin is und...

According to Peter Kelner, Labour seems determined to follow the death road and elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Well, as we know polls may not be as reliable as they seem, so we will need to wait until the final agony is ground out. However if this deluded and dangerous man IS elected leader of the Labour Party, what then? Well, for a start it may well be that Norman Baker's gloomy view of the UK as a one-party state is actually fulfilled. Certainly an electorate that was pretty reluctant to endorse Ed Miliband is unlikely to give more support to a party led by a leader from the pro-Russian far left. To my mind it seems pretty clear that a new form of politics is still needed in the UK. Indeed without it there will not be a UK for very much longer. Across the political spectrum, from left to right, there is recognition that a new constitutional settlement is needed. This needs to create a looser and more federal structure for the nations and regions of the UK and also open up t...

Just because Jeremy Corbyn is "authentic", in the sense that he says what he believes, that still does not make him any more moral or ethical than any other politician. In fact since most of what Corbyn believes is either bollocks, bullshit or delusional we could say that Corbyn is authentically dangerous . His record as an "anti poverty" campaigner is highly questionable: especially since most of his discredited economic policies, including state control over much larger parts of the economy, are more likely to create wider poverty than to reduce it. He is an ex-union organizer and a campaigner: he is certainly not an economist and his membership of "The Peoples Assembly Against Austerity" is almost hilarious in its po-faced self regard. Meanwhile, if we are to judge a man by his friends the Corbyn keeps extremely questionable company. Corbyn repeatedly condemns the British Army, while speaking up for the murderers of the IRA. Corbyn has actively su...

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the "polls" for the leadership of the Labour Party is, well, absurd. He is practically the textbook example of the unreconstructed Marxist hard left. A product of the sixties North London Poly, and a long time columnist for the Morning Star , which for younger readers is a comic inspired by Leninism. For goodness sake, even his parents met as peace campaigners during the romantic Socialist defeat of the Spanish Civil War! Yet the fact is that this totally unreconstructed dinosaur, a stalwart of mistaken and lost causes throughout his entire political career still looks better than the three overachieving Oxbridge high-flyers that he is pitted against. The Labour Party, despite the Social Democrat interlude of Tony Blair, was founded and in important aspects remains a Socialist Party. The battle over Clause IV- which committed Labour to Communist style state ownership of the means of production- may have been won by Blair and his cohorts, but pa...

They sow the wind      and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head;      it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain,      foreigners would swallow it up. Hosea 8-6 The first Conservative budget in 19 years is an act of of political hypocrisy so astonishingly blatant that it is hard to know whether to cringe at the opportunism or applaud the cynicism. George Osborne has the reputation as a masterful political tactician. Certainly he has been a astute observer of the political weather and occasionally he has been something of a rainmaker himself. His first Conservative budget is certainly far stronger from a political point of view that it is from an economic one. Take the Minimum Wage, which for the purposes of politics he re-branded as the "living wage". He portrayed the large increase as a "pay rise for Britain", yet the quid pro quo has been such a sharp reduction of in-work benefits that even such a "pay incre...

 The 2015 general election has seen a change in direction in the politics of the UK, yet in Scotland the change seems not far short of a revolution. The astonishing advance of the Scottish National Party- taking all but three seats in Scotland, despite failing to gain even a bare majority of the votes cast, still less the total electorate- was certainly one of the most eye-catching aspects of the election result.  For the more avid nationalists, the general election result is proof that the independence movement has become unstoppable and that Scotland will- despite the hiccough of the 2014 referendum- become independent in pretty short order. Yet the referendum result is hardly likely to be set aside so easily- not least because the total votes the SNP gained in 2015 is still a lot less even than the number of losing votes for Yes and it is still quite probable that Scotland - faced with a drastic fiscal deficit and dramatically declining North Sea revenue- would reject i...

As time has gone by, the message of the 2015 general election becomes even more bleak for the Liberal Democrats. Amid much talk of #LibDemfightback I see a party struggling to cope with the magnitude of the catastrophe that has befallen it. Frankly the policy discussions that are being put together as part of the leadership election campaign are a exercise in self delusion and denial.  There is only one discussion and only one policy that can offer the Liberal Democrats any relevance or viability at all: It is the constitutional crisis that threatens to destroy the very fabric of the country.  2015 was one of the most blatantly unfair elections in British history - certainly since the passage of the Great Reform bill in 1832. Less than 25% of the electorate have supported the Conservatives, and yet they have 100% of the power. That is an absolute scandal. In Scotland a party that gained the support of 36% of the electorate has all but three of the Parliamentary sea...

A man who smoked, who famously refused to exercise, who even more famously drank way too much, who was middle aged, male and Scottish has died only 55. In a way, therefore, Charles Kennedy was a young death foretold. Yet, still it has been a heartbreaking day for those who admired him, or liked him or who knew him. I know that there have been a hundred "the Charles Kennedy I knew" pieces in every media outlet today. It is hard to offer anything more than cliche or stereotype. I have known Charles since I was 19, and he was 25. I -like so many others- was caught in his charm: his all too human charm. His death was not necessarily a surprise, but my God it has been a shock. A bitter reminder of how near mortality really is.  What has made this day so painful has been to understand that Charles, as brilliant, warm, clever and charming as he was, never did escape the doom that was pronounced upon him when he was elected aged only 23 as the MP for the West Highlands. It was ...

Tim Farron has, famously, compared the resilience of the Liberal Democrats in the face of discouragement to the supposed indestructibility of cockroaches even after nuclear war. Paddy Ashdown too, often praises the strength of will of the activists of the party. In the face of the worst general election result in more than half a century, the surge in membership applications for the Liberal Democrats is a small sign of optimism after the disaster. Yet the scale of defeat is so large that to rebuild in any conventional way will take many decades. Indeed, with the significant economic, social and demographic changes underway in British society, the grim truth is that a recovery in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats may not be possible at all. Meanwhile all of us are working through the stages of grief that this defeat has caused us. The lessons of both the coalition and the general election are slowly emerging from the smoke of disaster, and the first lesson is that this defeat, ...

In the course of the mid twentieth century the Liberal Party, that great organ of the Victorian state was destroyed. In his 1935 book, "The Strange Death of Liberal England" , George Dangerfield analysed the course of social and political change that had altered the course of the country and in the process destroyed the Liberal Party. Of course the factors that lead to the Liberal eclipse were both long and short term, and as a work of history the book is a commentary on a whole raft of social and political evolution. From the 1960s onward, the Liberal Party began to recover. It established itself as a party of protest, of practical pavement politics, and from this niche it made steady progress up until the 2005 election. The impact of the vote against the Iraq war moved the party into a new position as a radical conscience, as it had been during the Boer War, which created the conditions for the Liberal landslide of 1906. In 2010, however, the party did not achieve a lands...

I have held off commenting on the UK general election in too much detail. Partly because I have found it so disappointingly provincial that it has been a challenge to sort between the electoral shallowness of each of the pitiful manifestos. At a time when the UK faces existential challenges: the threat of another European war; a global economy whose life-support is fading by the day; a failing and spectacularly expensive public sector; and any of another thirty or forty serious problems, it is shocking how weak the response of the politicians has been. Yet in truth I do not blame the political talking heads themselves- in the end it is the ignorance of the voters that is driving the most dumbed-down election that I can ever remember. The sophistication of the parties' voter ID systems has already eliminated the most egregious points of debate, and 90% of the electoral resources of the political parties are now focused on the 20% of seats that will actually decide the outcome, and...

The achievements of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats in government have been remarkable. In the face of an economic crisis where many commentators were predicting the economic collapse of the UK, the coalition has taken decisions which have left the country in far better shape than they found it. Britain has performed better than almost all its peers, and there is little doubt, that in raising the tax threshold and defeating the SNP referendum to break up the UK, it has been Liberal Democrats who have been the first out of the trenches. Liberal Democrat ministers, from Ed Davey to Steve Webb, to David Laws, have proven to be better informed, better prepared and far more effective than their Conservative colleagues. From the point of view of managerial efficiency, the Liberal Democrats have undoubtedly proven that they have all the requisite skills and more to deliver effective government of this country. So it is more than a little frustrating to see the party continue to languis...