Quentin Davies Fires Blanks
The problem with Quentin Davies…
No. I’ll start again.
One of the many problems with Quentin Davies, the merchant banking Tory-turned-Socialist MP for Grantham and Stamford, is that he’s never had to build a bridge over a stream using only a bit of frayed rope, a bald tractor tyre, a punctured oil drum and a handful of underdeveloped 13-year-old boys. If he had, he wouldn’t be wishing the Combined Cadet Force on our state schools.
I can see the thinking, though. It goes like this:
1. The Labour Party has decided that dropping cadet forces into state schools will boost its electoral fortunes.
2. The MoD is pretty much the only arm of the state that doesn’t have lots of New Labour types running the show.
3. The military top brass particularly loathe the Secretary of State for War Defence.
4. The only person who will have the credibility to push the job through has to be a… [former] Tory.
And as Quentin (unlike Shaun Woodward) looks like the sort of chap who might - conceivably - have been bumped up to Brigadier a few months before he was told to retire, he got to carry the can.
So far, so good. But what no-one has yet questioned is Quentin’s actual suitability for the job.
He may wear Savile Row suits. His father may have been in the army. But the fact is that Quentin went to the Quaker - and thus pacifist - Leighton Park School. So, unless he was learning how to prime grenades in some secret, militant chapter of the Woodcraft Folk, he will never have picked up first hand knowledge of how the Combined Cadet Force actually works.
Which means he’s probably an idealist.
So, to help cure him of his fantasies, I’m going to compare the commonly-believed virtues of CCF life with the reality - as experienced by me between 1987-1990 (in the RAF and RN sections) at a school in the heart of Quentin’s own constituency (as pictured above, a decade or two before my time).
Integrity
There’s nothing like the threat of hard work to make sure you - and those with whom you are temporarily saddled - devise an honest and foolproof plan to get out of it. In Cumbria, back in 1989, such a wheeze ensured that my little group of miniature soldiers, sailors and airmen got up at dawn, packed up the tents without a sound, and pissed off - via bus - to drink beer (underage) in Penrith; thereby avoiding a 20+ mile trek and giving everyone time to learn their lines about “missing you in the fog on the peak, sir” before they rolled up at the appointed campsite. An excellent day’s work, which most of my companions claimed as part of their silver or gold Duke of Edinburgh Award.
*
Compassion
“Oi, Needsmith. Your roll mat’s fallen out of your rucksack.”
Needsmith looks round to see said object rolling about 400 feet down the hill face.
“Go and fetch it Needsmith. Everyone else, we’re stopping here till he’s got it.”
Half an hour later, as Needsmith ascends, panting with his lost bedding: “Right, here he comes. Let’s go.”
“Can I take a break too?”
“Fuck off Needsmith,” says the great chief, who only half an hour led us up the wrong hill. “It’s your fault for dropping your stuff. Only another 15 miles to go.”
*
Safe use of firearms
“Needsmith,” says the shooting master to the idiot lying on the point with a .22 in his hands.
“Yes Sir?” asks Needsmith, turning full circle with his loaded weapon and pointing it at the officer’s desk.
Voice from under desk: “Put. That. Fucking. Thing. Down. And. Step. Outside.”
*
Observational skills
Master to NCO: “So, what I want you to do in this drill…”
A pause as he examines another, smaller boy standing next to him.
“What the hell do you want? Sit down with the others, boy.’
Smaller boy, blushing and pointing to the stripe on his shoulder: “I’m a Junior Corporal, Sir.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say so before?”
*
Smartness
“Fucking hell. Look at his boots - they’re like mirrors.”
“Fucking ginger keeno. Let’s stamp on them.”
“Great idea. That’ll teach him.”
*
Equal Opportunities
“Jesus Christ. What’s Stumpy doing up there with all the top brass? He’s a bloody cripple.”
“His dad’s the Major General.”
“No way! Then he ought to tell his son to get a haircut. Permy twat. No wonder he ended up teaching.”
*
Tact
“Ah, Locker. This is the Air Commodore.”
“Oh.”
Then, in the plane: “So, Locker. Are you a day boy or a boarder?”
“A day boy, sir”.
Air Commodore, immediately dropping the plane a few hundred feet: “Ah. Do you want to join the RAF when you leave school?”
“No. I want to join the Navy.”
Plane lands 13 minutes after take-off.
*
Anyway, I’m sure you get the idea. Davies with his pacifist upbringing probably thinks the whole wheeze is about gentlemanly behaviour, playing the game, and possibly cutting a dash in the Queen’s uniform (not her personal uniform, but you see what I mean).
He’s wrong, and he can take it from Leading Seaman Benjamin Locker, CCF (RN Ret’d).
Sure: there were some excellent cadets, who were cut out for the experience. But the fact was that most of us were in the thing because the alternative was a somewhat stigmatised afternoon of community service (otherwise known as “granny bashing”). And I can’t help thinking that a lot of the boys who spent their Friday afternoons running round Springfields with massive logs, or square bashing in the Dell, could usefully have been improved by a bit of regular, selfless work for other people.
So, Quentin, go ahead: but whatever else you do, don’t make the CCF an expected part - whether implicitly or explicitly - of secondary education. You’ll only undermine the good you’re setting out to do.
Published on 28th May, 2008
“Sometimes people need to think before they act”
She has recently, in her official capacity, threatened to shoot someone, threatened to have someone beaten up, and most famously she called the balding president of City Council Ken Cockrel “Shrek”.
Thankfully there were some school children on hand to admonish Detroit councilwoman Monica Conyers for her appalling behaviour.
“Sometimes people need to think before they act“.
Bravo to the girl who told it like it was.
UPDATE: Watch this follow up interview for a classic and sick-making example of the “I was bullied as a child” defence.
Published on 13th May, 2008
Pravda on the rates (II)
A quick note of thanks to friend and local statistician, Dr Archer, for picking up on my analysis of council spending on propaganda.
Published on 12th May, 2008
Council propaganda and the Labour vote
Like Bill Dornan over at Foolish Interruption, I think that the nonsense written about the Evening Standard and the mayoral election is an expression of sour grapes.
…can we please lay to bed the idea that the Evening Standard swung the election? – it’ll only encourage them. A tawdry rag it may be, a great former of opinion it is not. The idea It’s the Standard Wot Won It seems particularly strong in the Guardian’s own little world. The Standard’s “poisonous” campaign has been blamed by a few more Ken fans (all links just from the Graun, I can’t face digging out all the lip quivering stuff I’ve read). The irony, of course, is that the Guardian itself ran a string of vigorous, if somewhat hysterical articles (only vulgar rags like the Standard run actual campaigns you see) against Boris: the effete and frivilous Tory, the racist, the evil, baby-eating Tory bigot etc.
Bill’s absolutely right. What pretentions either paper may have of influencing voters, the fact remains that most people in London read neither of them.
What most people in London do read - or, at the very least, receive - is the propaganda freesheet that is shoved through their letterboxes by their local council. On that basis, I felt that these were the publications that had the power to influence the largest number of voters.
So I hunted out some statistics that would help me uncover whether there was any connection between the amount spent on these publications, or the frequency with which they were circulated, and the way in which voters in London boroughs voted in the last set of local elections (ie 2006). I found them here in a report about Ken Livingstone’s budget proposals for 2005-2006. In an appendix I found a chart that was chock-full of details relating to “London Borough publications funded by ratepayers”.
The idea was, of course, to prove that at a cost to Londoners of £3,300,000 per annum, Livingstone’s own propaganda sheet The Londoner was good value for money. It wasn’t: new mayor Boris Johnson scrapped it within days of taking office.
However, the information about the borough publications is fascinating. The table below is the data as presented by the GLA, minus the details about The Londoner and those for the Corporation of London’s thrice-yearly Cityview (which is anomalous in the sense of both audience and the fact that the Corporation isn’t controlled by a political party). I have added to that data details of the party that won the council in the previous local elections (ie 2002).
At first glance, these figures don’t seem too bad. If you look down the grey column headed CPCPH (Cost Per Copy Per Household), you’ll see that there’s no real pattern between spending and which party controls a borough. The Lib Dems and Labour are more likely to spend more per individual copy, but the Labour Party is also likely to get a better deal for the taxpayer - a competitive 6p per copy per household in Hackney, and no cost at all in Labour-controlled Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow (the freesheets were paid for by advertising). That said, it needs to be borne in mind that there were no figures available for Waltham Forest (then No Overall Control), Tower Hamlets, Brent (both Labour) or Islington (then Lib Dem).
However, by multiplying Cost per Copy per Household, by circulation, and then multiplying the new figure by the number of editions produced in a year, it is possible to work out how much each borough council was spending on freesheets. Here you will begin to spot a very clear trend:
Labour councils spent the largest sums of taxpayers’ money annually on freesheets. What’s more, those high spending boroughs retained control of their boroughs in the subsequent council elections in 2006. Only one Labour council spending £165,000 or less on propaganda - Barking and Dagenham - retained control. All the others lost overall control or fell to the Tories.
Of course, one could argue that this is slightly unfair. Some of those councils have much larger populations, so have to spend more money to reach all their voters residents. So, breaking down the figures to show the annual taxpayer cost per household, you get the following:
There’s a similar pattern. Only those Labour councils spending over £1.50 or more on freesheets managed to retain control. All the others were swept out of power in 2006 (though there is the anomaly of Lambeth, where Labour gained control from a hung council). It also emerges that the Tory controlled Barnet, whilst spending a relatively large £152,880 on freesheets, spent a reasonable 72p per head - far divorced from the outrageous £6.50 Greenwich was expecting its residents to cough up each year.
Even these figures only tell part of the story. There also seems to be a connection between how frequently council freesheets are circulated, and whether the ruling party keeps control after the 2006 elections.
Yes, you guessed it. All the Labour councils that retained control of their boroughs in 2006 were issuing between 11 and 26 freesheets to every household. No council issuing 10 or fewer managed to cling on.
So what can we conclude?
I’m not a statistician, but there are some facts we can deduce from the data.
1. Labour boroughs spent an average on £1.77 on council propaganda. Tory boroughs spent an average of 70p.
2. The Labour boroughs that spent most on council propaganda were likely to have retained control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
3. The Labour boroughs that spent least on council propaganda were likely to have ceded control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
4. Over £3.5million was wasted on propaganda that could have been more usefully spent on actually improving people’s lives, instead of convincing them their lives had already improved. If you include Livingstone’s The Londoner this figure leaps to near the £7million mark, and would doubtless cross it if we had the figures for the freesheets issued by Tower Hamlets, Islington, Brent and Waltham Forest.
5. Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow and Harrow all proved councils can issue as much stuff as they like, at no cost to the taxpayer, if it is funded by advertising.
My personal view is that, in scrapping The Londoner, Boris Johnson has shown that in these belt-tightening times, there are better things to spend taxpayers’ money on than freesheets. I also think there’s scope for a campaign to abolish them or, at the very least, bring their expense down to the absolute minimum. That said, even if it were funded by advertising, who would relish this sort of thing landing on their doormat?
I’d also like to see some more work - using bang-up-to-date figures - to examine the link between Labour councils’ high freesheet expenditure and local election success. But until someone does that, my response to those who say “It was the Standard wot won it” for Boris will be that “It was Hackney Today (described by one local councillor as a cross between Pravda and Heat) wot won it” for our own elected mayor, Jules Pipe.
(Note: if you want a copy of my spreadsheet, you can download it here.)
Published on 10th May, 2008
What’s Wendy Done?
I thought politicians were supposed to have highly-sensitive antennae, designed to stop them looking foolish. A bit like Yes Minister’s James Hacker, who refused to be photographed with a pig, but was happy to be snapped with a woolly lamb.
The electronic age throws up new challenges in this respect. Even Gordon Brown would think twice before hosting his website with - for example - “Don’t Panic Web Design”, and I can’t see David Cameron plumping for a company called “Top Hat Media”. They’d be laughed at if they did.
That’s why I was quite amused to find out who hosts the website of Scottish Labour Party leader Wendy Alexander, especially as she and Gordon Brown can’t actually decide whether she did, or did not, call for an immediate referendum on Scottish independence. “Bring it on,” she said. Or did she?.
Anyway, in an attempt to shed a bit more light on what was going on, I visited www.wendyalexandermsp.org.uk, where I was delighted to find a photo of her posing in a bottle shop. Intrigued by the lack of caption, I wondered where the image came from. So I did this:
And, having opened the image in new window, I was delighted to find it was hosted at…
Yes, a server called wendy.intraspin.com
I’m sure Intraspin is an excellent firm - but I can’t think its name is designed to bolster the reputation of any Labour politician who is trying to spin themself out of this kind of mess.
Published on 8th May, 2008
Boris on the doorstep
I have no political ambitions, so I can speak freely: I didn’t spent three months campaigning for Boris Johnson because I thought he would be the finest mayor ever elected to municipal office.
Nor was I greatly motivated by hatred of Ken Livingstone; although I came to loathe him more as his campaign got grubby and mendacious.
What really got me out leafleting and canvassing night after night was an idea kindled in an Evening Standard column by fellow Hackney resident, Jonathan Freedland, which was published in May 2006 - long before Tory councillor Harry Phibbs first floated the idea of a Johnson mayoralty.
Freedland’s piece appeared just before a set of local elections, and although he rightly thought “Hackney falling to the Tories is about as likely as Wayne Rooney throwing off his plaster cast and dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum”, he was impressed to receive a Conservative leaflet through his front door:
…full marks for effort to the Hackney Conservatives. They clearly understand something that the wider Tory party is only just beginning to learn: that if the Conservatives are ever to win a general election, they have to rebuild themselves in even the most unpromising areas - which include Hackney.
What Freedland seemed to have missed was the fact that the three Tory councillors he was being asked to vote for - “Jacob Landau, Eric Ollerenshaw and Shuja Shaikh” - were busy defending the seats they had won back in 2002. Far from rebuilding themselves in his area, the Conservatives were hanging on to what they’d long held: a small number of wards in the largely Orthodox Jewish areas of north Hackney.
That said, his point about the Tories needing to get a foothold in unpromising areas was bang on the money: in 2005, the (now) GLA member Andrew Boff had fought a by-election in Queensbridge ward and won convincingly. He picked up a lot of support by campaigning to preserve the future of Broadway Market, rightly enraged by the way in which Hackney Council had greedily tried to destroy successful local businesses.
Boff’s tenure was short - he narrowly lost the seat in 2006 - but he proved that the Tory party could gain a foothold in any area, provided the candidate took a practical and inspiring lead on pressing local issues. But, as Freedland went on to say (and I paraphrase), taking a localist approach to capture individual wards is a slow old method of Stamping Out Socialism (or what passes for it in the Hackney Nu-Lab fiefdom).
But Freedland saw a much more effective alternative, originally spotted by the LSE’s Tony Travers:
Where’s there’s a mayoral election to be won, the Tories, armed with a sufficiently attractive candidate, could conquer in a single night a city that might otherwise have taken a decade to capture.
That’s the sentence that’s been at the back of my mind as I’ve stuck yet another thousand leaflets through letterboxes, or tapped politely on yet another yob-splintered front door. It’s not an election, it’s a conquest; and the conquest is not simply significant power to clear up the divisive mess that has blighted this city, but winning the belief amongst many more Londoners that there is a decent alternative to the target-driven indifference of a Labour-run local council. With a popularly-elected mayor in Boris, there should be no Labour councillor who is safe from a concerted, localist Conservative campaign. Even in Hackney.
That’s why, paradoxically, to boost the longer-term hope of Tory representation across the whole of Hackney (and boroughs like it), local activists first had to be relentless in taking Boris’s message out to those areas where support for the Tories was already the strongest. Over the last three months, the bulk of Conservative leafleting and canvassing in Hackney was focused on the three, predominantly Orthodox Jewish wards the party already holds. And that’s why many of us spent election day in Chingford, getting out the vote in the streets with the strongest concentration of supporters.
It worked. And, in a sense, a similar approach of getting out the inner-city vote in estates and plush, left-wing areas like Stoke Newington worked for Ken Livingstone and his supporters. But there was one vital difference, and this is what I think won it for Boris: Ken had had eight years to woo outer London and failed to do it; Boris was promising new policies for the whole of London, which picked him up a good proportion of votes in the inner-city, as well as in the traditionally Tory outer boroughs.
Certainly, as I canvassed in Hackney, I picked up on a determined desire for change. Of course, the bulk of this was in strongly Tory areas; but in some of the less solid estates in Stamford Hill, along with the council blocks down in the south Hackney ward of De Beauvoir, I sensed that the tide of support was slowly shifting in the Conservative direction. What was hampering much of it, though, was an entrenched feeling that voting Tory was still taboo.
It’s not an easy thing to prove, but it would explain the woman who - on seeing her neighbour pass by - dropped her voice and whispered that she would be voting for Boris; the Turkish woman who wouldn’t say who she was voting for, quietly launched into a diatribe against Livingstone, and then admitted she was going to vote Tory; the many people who refused to say who had won their vote, but then shouted “good luck” as I moved on to the next flat. It would also explain why local Labour councillor Luke Akehurst failed to uncover much of the Conservative vote as he did his rounds.
Boris’s victory, then, has the power to do several things. Firstly, I think that - coupled with the Conservative success in the English local elections - it will shatter the taboo amongst working class voters for voting Tory. It will also break that inner-city mentality that a Tory vote is a wasted vote, and help people realise that Labour councils can be held properly to account or booted out. And it will make people turn to the Tories and start asking: “What can you do for my area?”
The latter question is by far the most important. Let’s return to Freedland’s prediction back in 2006:
Let’s say the Tories get lucky with candidates; there’s still more they have to do. This is a shift larger than personalities; it is about principle. For the Conservatives would have to become the lead advocates of localism, the belief that decisions are best taken close to the people they affect - which means locally, wherever possible.
There’s no denying the party got lucky with their Mayoral candidate, but I feel there’s a long way to go before the Tories properly re-establish themselves as the party of localism. Now they have a mandate in London, it’s time for local associations to throw themselves into those solid Labour wards and start proving they can make positive changes in those communities. If they do that, and the new mayor carries on as he has begun, the political map of London could look very different in two years’ time. Wayne Rooney has lost his plaster cast - here’s to him dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum.
Published on 6th May, 2008
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