Another By-election, another u-turn

… and no doubt they’ll be telling us in future how much better off we are because of the postponment of the planned 2p rise in fuel duty. No doubt, also, we are expected to be grateful that in a few months, petrol will be only 130p/litre and not 132p.

So, when the Conservatives propose cuts in fuel duty at times when fuel prices are high, it’s

“a dishonest gimmick which would mean the Tories would have to hike up taxes somewhere else or would mean a massive hole in the public finances.

“Either George Osborne doesn’t understand the way tax revenues work, or he’s prepared to play fast and loose with the public finances for the sake of a good headline.”

But when Labour postpone increases in fuel duty at time when fuel prices are high, it’s

“the right thing to do to help motorists and to help businesses.”

The ever-consistent Lib Dems, however are pouring scorn on both moves. You remember the Lib Dems: they were suggesting tax cuts a few months ago, and are the same party that wants/doesn’t want (delete deopending on day of week) a referendum on the EU.

Henley: John Howell Sends Clegg Back to the Drawing Board

Headline coverage of by-election results tends to focus on the placings of each party (well, I suppose who came first is pretty important!) So there’s probably a muted sigh of relief at LibDem HQ in Cowley Street this morning, among the general despair, that the media haven’t picked up on exactly what a disastrous outcome the Henley result has been for the Libs.

The headlines are about the fact that, on his first anniversary in office, Brown’s candidate plummeted to fifth place behind the BNP and Greens. (On many BBC bulletins right now, they are leading on the Zimbabwean elections.) The Lib Dems, despite pulling out all the usual stops, scraped only a 1.8% increase in their vote. Lord Rennard, as I noted earlier, ran the usual personal negative Lib Dem campaign which has worked reasonably well for them before - well, pre-2007 anyway. Now it’s back to the drawing board. Thing is, it’s been so long, can anyone at Cowley Street find it?

They Just Don’t Get It

So, Kelvin Mackenzie might step in to be Gordon Brown’s stooge stand against David Davis in the Haltemprice & Howden by-election. I hope Kelvin knows what he is letting himself in for by coming onto the other side of the media/victim fence. I would find it difficult to see Mackenzie, given his tabloid background, not getting personal in the campaign. This by-election was looking to be genuinely about the issue – if Mackenzie loses the plot then he will find himself reaping a whirlwind.

Add to the mix the fact that quite a few people will think that anything Murdoch/Mackenzie is for they are against, then I would say “bring it on”.

Of course, Kelvin has said he will do it if Labour don’t put anyone up themselves.

Thing is, Labour just don’t get it. Labour blogger Luke Akehurst, for example, is getting a good old kicking for suggesting, as indeed Nick Robinson was heard doing last night, that Labour should get a terrorist victim or retired Army or Police type to stand. Rachel from North London has put him firmly in his place as regards the first suggestion, and I can’t think of too many retired police or armed forces officers who would even give the government the time of day, with broken promises on pay rises, overstretched forces (both police and armed) and servicemen still at risk because of poor equipment. This seems to be a more specific form of the Yasmin Alibhai Brown “you are black/muslim/poor therefore you must vote Labour” way of thinking.

Labour – and indeed too many of the Westminster media - do seem to genuinely believe that there must be a grubby tactical motive to Davis’ actions, and that the Tories must have been just looking to give Gordon Brown a bloody nose on Wednesday. With a combination of arrogance and naivety, they sneer with derision the invocation of the principles of Magna Carta and feign deafness when mention is made of setting the boundaries of the State – presumably because the State is good, boundaries suggest constraints and why would one want to constrain Good?

Anyhow, one way or another it looks like there certainly will be a by-election. More interesting is how the last couple of days will affect that other parliamentary by-election in Henley….

One of Those West Wing Summits

Brown to Meet Oil Industry Chiefs

Well that’s going to be a productive meeting. Not. Rather more likely it’ll be one of those five minute summits a la The West Wing.

According to the clunking fist himself, writing in the Grauniad (all his own work, I’m sure):

The cause of rising prices is clear: growing demand and too little supply

Uh-oh. Gordon’s been reading the Dummies Guide to Economics again. Actually, that isn’t the only cause of rising prices. There is also clear evidence of a speculative bubble, fuelled by stock market volatility. Anyway, in his typically roundabout way, as summarised by the BBC, Gordon says that:

… an increase in the supply of oil would lower the price of fuel and ease pressure on the government over the planned tax increases.

I can think of something else that would help reduce the price of fuel at the pumps. It starts with a “t” and rhymes with “fax”, and he’s been coining it in for months on the back of the higher oil price. In any case, since a couple of weeks ago it’s clear that, contrary to the squeals from the Left every time a Conservative suggests as tax cut, it can now just be put on the plastic, along with the 2.7bn from the 10p “solution”. After all, Brown gave us ten years of prosperity (not boom before bust, oh no) so he can’t be wrong.

Declares the rocking-horse fancier:

But each country has also to act now to help those hit by high fuel bills. In Britain this means increased winter fuel payments; a new one-stop service on home energy efficiency; free insulation for people on low incomes and the over 70s and a £150m programme financed by the utility companies to cut fuel bills for lower income families.

In Britain this means fiddling around the edges with overly complicated solutions to the issue, rather than, ooh, say, cutting VAT on fuel? After all, aren’t we all tax cutters now?

Crewe and Nantwich - A Few Random Thoughts

Firstly, of course, well done to Edward Timpson and the team. Looks like Samantha Cameron has some competition.

Credit to the good people of Crewe and Nantwich for their patience and good judgement, including the dozens I phoned up last night, of which only three complained about the phone calls and the dead trees being pushed through their letterboxes.

Needless to say, I am more than happy for Labour members to carry on arguing for the next two years about whether it’s the policies (and if so, whether they can make things better) or Gordon Brown (can they ditch him in time), or whether they’re not left wing enough, centrist enough, or whether they should just accept the inevitable and plan for 2014/18.

Equally happy I am for Lib Dems to continue deluding themselves that they didn’t do too badly … they really are seriously patting themselves on the back for avoiding the squeeze and achieving a swing from Labour (even though they lost 4% off their vote share).

Note to Labour members: no matter how much you screw your faces up (though it may just be in pain), Hiro Nakamura is a fictional character, you can’t really turn back time to last October and call a General Election after all.

So, can we get on with Henley now please.

The Ubiquitous Crewe and Nantwich Post

So I’m off shortly to work the phones for Crewe and Nantwich. Before then, though, my obligatory pre-post-mortem on the by-election result.

If we Conservatives do win (and it’s still “if” as I’m not one to tempt fate), there will be inevitable talk of the wise men in grey suits (or Labour’s equivalent – is it brown synthetic suits?) filing into Number Ten with offerings of scotch and revolvers.

They are wasting their time. If Brown is suffering from chronic bunker delusion, then so will be those in the senior ranks of the party. As I’ve said before, we Conservatives were here in the mid-Nineties. In fact, Dizzy has demonstrated the point quite graphically (literally). Despite the omens from Newbury to Wirral South, many in the party thought we could turn the tide, Canute-like, with a few popular initiatives, and anyway the polls were understating our support, just like last time.

I had a conversation along similar lines earlier this week with a local Labour councillor. Frankly, Labour could announce a cure for the common cold and it would only be worth a couple of points in the polls.

The “toff” campaign not only underlines how politically inept the party, once of Blair, Campbell and Mandelson, has become, but also how such plainly desperate measures are now being considered. Get rid of Brown if you will, but it is Labour’s entire political mojo that has disappeared – and neither Miliband, Johnson, Straw or any of the others will be able to fix it this side of a spell in opposition.

With any luck, it’ll be a long spell.

Miliband’s Worst Nightmare .. A Conservative Win in Crewe & Nantwich

Of course David Miliband doesn’t want Labour to lose the by-election. He’s loyal to the Leader, as a serious leadership challenger hard-working Minister with his party’s and the country’s interests at heart.

Yet he probably has more reason than most for wanting to see Gwenyth’s daughter keep the seat - for seeing Gordon’s display of deck-chair rearranging yesterday actually helping to scrape a win in C&W. If Labour lose, then the pressure will be on him, either from the hotheads to go for broke, from fellow challengers wanting to flush him out early to do the initial dirty work, or simply a temptation to be seriously (and in an inevitably semi-visible kind of way) preparing for a bid when the time is right. The last thing he wants is to have even more of a spotlight on him right now – after all, in politics how many times do the front-runners at the start of the race actually win? Who wants to be the Heseltine or Portillo – the one who is out in the open for so long that he gives a clear shot for anyone who wishes to take it?

No, any serious challenger will want to see Gordon carry on and lose at the General Election. After all, what future leader wants to be at the helm of the ship just as it’s been left too late to avoid the iceberg? Better to revel in the luxury of opposition, with four years to regroup, lose the baggage and work on your prime-minister-in-waiting image.

And the best thing is, it’s easy to do - he can genuinely put all his efforts into backing Gordon to the hilt during the next two years, assuring the PM that he is behind him at all times, while omitting to mention that it’s because Gordon is acting as his human shield.

The Panic Button’s Getting Worn Out, Alistair

So we had the Inheritance Tax changes, a panic measure in response to George Osborne’s proposals at Conference last October. Then it was the overcomplicated Entrepreneurs’ Relief to head off criticism over the changes to Capital Gains Tax, now it’s an increase in personal allowances to try to fix the damage done by the (partial) abolition of the 10p tax rate. All these were perfectly avoidable messes. What is notable is that the time between the situation being created and the sudden scrambling around for a response is getting longer – in the case of the 10p debacle, some 14 months.

What Alistair Darling definitely cannot undo is the clear evidence that Labour, once a carefully run politically savvy organisation, is now lurching from one political miscalculation to the next, via the inevitable u-turn.

Of course, only days away from a by-election drubbing, Darling hasn’t had time to deal with the niggling details, such as where to find the £2.7bn, so its going on the plastic. Who says the government is affected by the credit crunch? However, a tax cut funded by borrowing is merely a deferral of the inevitable cut in public spending … using the logic that Labour have to attack Conservative desires to see tax reduced, that would be a £2.7m cut in public services, then – all for the sake of trying to avoid a few days of bad headlines next week.

Vow to Fight

Sometimes one might find an MP, particularly in a marginal seat, “vowing to fight” (it’s always a vow isn’t it?) something his or her own government or Prime Minister is doing. If done properly, it is usually tolerated by their colleagues, who will sympathise with the MP’s position and tend to see it as for the greater good of the party - keeping that constituency in the fold.

Not so often do we see the reverse - a Prime Minister vowing to fight something his own underlings are doing. Then again, it is just keeping the tradition going - after all, his seat in number 10 is hardly safe.

Of course, in truth he is fighting something that he did (at least with Tony) some years back when they created the half-baked mess that is the current constitutional set-up of the United Kingdom. At this rate we could well end up with a fully federated UK … would that be so much worse than where we are at the moment?

Some Fightback

Britain’s caretaker PM Gordon Brown has continued his fightback. The comeback that will propel Labour to an unprecedented fourth term … by axing a policy that Labour had suggested and quietly forgotten to remind everyone was still on the backburner.

The so-called “bin tax” was a proposal to make people pay for their refuse collection service based on the amount they throw away. Regardless of how much fairer than the current set-up it might have been, it was unworkable and unlikley to be taken up by most local authorities. Gordon has now announced that he is axing the Bin Tax. So, something that was probably not going to happen has been stopped by Brown.

Gosh. A grateful nation falls to its knees in thanks.