Glory days or glory hole for Fallon?
Michael Fallon (Conservative, Sevenoaks, majority 19,561, currently Secretary of State for Defence) toured the studios on Thursday "explaining" the Conservative manifesto and magnifying the impression gained by those reading the document that it was short on detail and devoid of much in the way of costings.
He ended up in the Newsnight studio with Evan Davis, who asked when the numbers were coming. There will be no more numbers, replied Fallon, other than output from consultations in the future (or, in the case of immigration, after the next election but three when we're finally so completely unattractive that nobody will come).
The video was doing the rounds even more indefatigably than the man himself, because even with Davis's half-embarrassed "I'm sorry to interrupt you but you're telling us nothing" and his surely-you-can-do-better-than-this laughter Fallon wasn't doing very well. If only he'd listened to the careers advice offered by his opponent in the Darlington byelection of 1983 and picked up a guitar...
On Friday morning John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, majority 15,700) came on the Today programme to do what Philip Hammond (Conservative, Runnymede and Weybridge, majority 22,134, currently Chancellor of the Exchequer) did the day after the Labour manifesto launch.
Except that Hammond criticised the inadequacy and inconsistency of Labour's numbers and received a fair hearing. It was pointed out that he had put together day-to-day spending and investment but he just kept going and seemed to get away with it. His one embarrassing moment came when he gave the forecast price of HS2 as £32 billion, without including the massive contingency allowed. That number might still exist in some treasury document but nobody uses it.
McDonnell observed that there were pretty well no numbers at all in the Tory manifesto and tried to work some out from the words. And John Humphrys switched to derisory chuckle mode and poked fun at McDonnell's "triple whammy for pensioners" with no further reference to the substance of the manifesto they were supposedly discussing.
Kenneth Clarke (Conservative, Rushcliffe, majority 13, 829) came along a bit later to celebrate the fact that the document he will - loosely - be fighting under in June contained no numbers and not many specific commitments. It's certainly true that Cameron/Osborne's "five year tax lock" on the taxes which bring in most of the government's money was a stupid move, but Clarke's patrician "We will do only good things" manifesto would rightly be unacceptable today.
Triple whammies all round
One of the interesting things about the campaign is the development of Corbyn's use of humour. He's been using it to fend off unwanted questions in place of the grumpy walking away which attracted negative reviews. In the big speeches it might be scripted, but some of it must be coming from the man himself.At a Friday campaign stop he said "Another party has published a manifesto. I won't mention its name because its leader doesn't like to and... I don't want to intrude on private grief". Not Robin Williams perhaps, but a nice critical dig and perfectly good when he's on the road.
The theme was the Tories' "triple whammy on pensioners": means-testing winter fuel payments, scrapping the triple lock on pensions and the moves on social care. Some of the critics got it a bit wrong, as did the media, as the Tories wanted them to, with the "quadrupling the current limit" line, but Labour has run on it ever since.
It's not just Labour. People are talking about it, and people are working out the numbers the Tories have refused to give us. David Gauke (Conservative, South West Hertfordshire, majority 23,263, currently Chief Secretary to the Treasury) addressed an older audience through the medium of Radio 4's Any Questions. Questions from the audience were:
- As I get older, will I be better off suffering from cancer or from a degenerative disease like dementia?
- Has May risked her landslide with her raid on pensioners’ finances?
- Is a free school breakfast as good as lunch? What’s your reaction to Tory plans to means test lunches & give free breakfast?
- What’s your reaction to the government admission that they have not costed their plan to slash immigration?
Even the Bow Group, a Conservative party think tank which used to be fairly establishment and centrist but now concentrates on goading the leadership, called the social care proposals “the biggest stealth tax in history”. The pundits are waiting with bated breath for the first polls after the Tory manifesto. And #DementiaTax has caught on as a label for it.
While I was wondering how much-cut local authorities could cope with a massive expansion in demand for Deferred Payment Agreements, which is the payment method actually mentioned on page 65 of the manifesto, others were looking another way - "It all makes sense if you think about social care as a commercial opportunity".
An internet that Theresa May approves of
"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technologyand the internet. We disagree," is the opening of a section headed A FRAMEWORK FOR DATA AND THE DIGITAL ECONOMY. And elsewhere: "we will take up leadership in a new arena, where concern is shared around the world: we will be the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet".
This is and has been a government which presided over the Investigatory Powers Act after flawed opposition from the Lib Dems in coalition and a heavy foot on the brake from David Anderson, the reviewer of terrorism legislation. David Cameron (who?) and Amber Rudd (Conservative, Hastings and Rye, majority 4,796, currently Home Secretary) are both convinced that encryption must be made breakable, despite the implications for each one of us operating online.
Sometimes you need a lawyer. Paul Bernal lectures in law at the University of East Anglia and concludes that "though there are a few bright spots, the major proposals are deeply disturbing and will send shivers down the spine of anyone interested in internet freedom". Later, he commented on the comments his blog post had attracted.
Interesting reactions to my blog on #ToryManifesto internet control. Some think I'm pandering to multinationals, others to Russian trolls.— Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) May 20, 2017
And then sometimes you need a laugh before getting back to the serious stuff.
NEWS! Government unveils absolutely fantastic new regulations about what people can say online https://t.co/QnQJHVyuuI pic.twitter.com/9e33lEPwcU— NewsThump (@newsthump) May 19, 2017
Bye bye Leveson 2
On a related subject, I'll just quote a paragraph from page 80 of the Conservative manifesto.
"At a time when the internet is changing the way people obtain their news, we also need to take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy and a free and independent press. We will ensure content creators are appropriately rewarded for the content they make available online. We will be consistent in our approach to regulation of online and offline media. Given the comprehensive nature of the first stage of the Leveson Inquiry and given the lengthy investigations by the police and Crown Prosecution Service into alleged wrongdoing, we will not proceed with the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. We will repeal Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2014, which, if enacted, would force media organisations to become members of a flawed regulatory system or risk having to pay the legal costs of both sides in libel and privacy cases, even if they win."
The hope is... it will keep us important
Saturday's not entirely manufactured story was Emily Thornberry (Labour, Islington South and Finsbury, majority 12,708) versus Nia Griffith (Labour, Llanelli, majority 7,095). Thornberry had told LBC that Trident would go into Labour's post-victory defence review and you can't guarantee the outcome of a review. Griffith could have worked on from that position but she chose to say that Thornberry was wrong.
“Nobody has raised the issue of removing the Trident nuclear deterrent from our manifesto," she told Newsnight, which stretches credulity. Labour's policy forum and conference (with a big input from the unions) decided last year as it has done several times to "keep the nuclear deterrent". Thus are media spats made, and John Woodcock (Labour, Barrow and Furness, majority 795) can always be relied on for an opinion.
Woodcock told Today on Radio 4 that "the policy on this is settled" and whoever wins the election would be holding a defence review. I'm not sure the Tories would bother, since they seem to be treating the election as an interlude in continuing normal business for many policy areas, but depreciation of sterling and (whisper who dares) bad or optimistic management of the MoD have left one of those famous black holes in the forecasts.
Another gem from Woodcock was that Trident had passed the "point of no return", which is obviously not true. Direct cancellation penalties from BAE at Barrow and the various American companies who supply the missiles and service the process would be big, as would the political blowback natioanlly and within NATO, but cancellation is always possible. The cost to the Barrow economy of losing the submarine contract would be massive, but neither Trident nor Woodcock's place in the Commons is sacrosanct.
Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, Islington, majority 21,194) found himself telling a Birmingham audience "the manifesto makes it very clear that the Labour party has come to a decision and is committed to Trident... We’re also going to look at the real security needs of this country on other areas such as cyber-security, which I think the attack on our NHS last week proved there needs to be some serious re-examination of our defences against those kind of attacks.”
In the face of the predictable attacks (Theresa May: "A Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government could not be relied upon to defend this country") a Labour "source" told us “Trident will be renewed come what may, the continuous at-sea deterrent”. The nuclear deterrent would be included in a Labour government’s strategic defence review, but it would be looking at issues like costings and how to protect it from cyber-attacks.
Nowadays I always return to the conclusion of Ian Jack's piece on British nukes for the Guardian:
"Nuclear weapons were never the done deal, the only way forward, that the ebullient certainties of politicians such as the present defence minister, Michael Fallon, would have us believe. They have been contentious inside the British establishment for 70 years, never properly scrutinised because opposition to them was usually based on moral and not practical grounds. If we didn’t already have them, would we want to acquire them? Nobody I talked to in the course of reporting this piece thought so, but the question is hypothetical. Trident may or may not keep us safe. The hope is, and always has been, that it will keep us important."
