NO2ID

Tony Blair took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994. Since then, most political commentators in the press and the broadcast media have supported him and Gordon Brown and Labour. Think of these commentators as critics, locked up in the theatre of the Palace of Westminster, admiring the performance of the actors on stage, and turning in witty and erudite notices to their editors. The public were somewhere outside the theatre. They did not impinge on the happily closed system of entertainment inside.

In April 2008 – a year late – the political commentators noticed the abolition of the 10% income tax rate band and they noticed that there were 5.3 million victims. The outside world could no longer be ignored. Disbelief could no longer be suspended.

As they came blearily out into the daylight, the full horror of what they had done became clear. They had not, after all, these political commentators, been critics at a play all these years. They had not been working in the entertainment industry. They had been supporting a government which was increasing tax on the poorest. And they, the critics-cum-political commentators, were complicit. They were guilty. It was, partially, their fault.

And not just 10p. When they came to think about it, they were complicit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempted destruction of the UK's education system, the rise of PFI in the health service, the credit crunch, the energy crisis, the Lisbon Treaty, the onslaught on civil liberties, and much else in a long and gruesome catalogue.

The Guardian were the quickest to react. In the weeks leading up to the 1 May local elections, they had a collective nervous breakdown. There is no other word for it, no other way to describe it. In their articles, the political commentators were distraught, they were crying, there was self-reproach, they lashed out at others, they tried in vain to defend themselves, they were raving, they made no sense, ... Then Labour lost Crewe and Nantwich and they finally gave in and acknowledged reality.

Which explains why their reaction, on the Guardian, is among the most measured in its coverage of David Davis yesterday and today. They have already accepted that the government is dead. David Davis can't make them any more dead. They have already accepted that the Conservatives will win the next election. David Davis can't stop that happening. And so they are more capable than most of assessing what David Davis is actually doing. Not all its commentators, it's not perfect, but more than most papers, the Guardian is measured in its reaction. See for example Paul Kingsnorth, Julian Glover, Michael White, the Guardian leader and, above all, Polly Toynbee.

Compare that with the Times. Rachel Sylvester has written an article of the purest poison. And the leader writer, the same. It is extraordinary that a national newspaper of repute should publish these pieces. What is going on? How has it happened?

The answer is, they're having their nervous breakdown a month later than the Guardian. This is their guilt pouring out. They are ashamed of themselves. They are angry and resentful and all the more so when faced with David Davis doing something realistic and necessary.

The FT are fairly measured, like the Guardian. Their leader makes a few cracks about David Davis spoiling things for the Conservative party. But their heart isn't in it, they know that he isn't trying to hurt the Conservative party and that he can't and that he wouldn't.

Unlike Iain Martin, in the Telegraph, who appears to have the same problem as Rachel Sylvester. If the diagnosis above is correct, he, too, must be having a nervous breakdown. You wouldn't have thought he was a secret admirer of Gordon Brown but, there it is, the symptoms speak for themselves.

The Telegraph leader is pretty sensible, Simon Heffer more so, and there's a chap called Davis writing there, too, who also had an article in the Guardian yesterday – he seems pretty sensible. He certainly doesn't seem to need emergency psychiatric treatment, unlike some other people who could be mentioned.

These (temporarily) demented journalists face a problem. Their solution is to lash out at David Davis and the Conservative party. It won't work. It won't help. Problem and method pass one another by.

Nick Robinson argues that David Davis's action is dangerous for the Conservative party and that David Cameron knows it. When David Cameron says David Davis's action is courageous and brave, according to Nick Robinson David Cameron means mad. No he doesn't. He means courageous and brave. Mr Robinson's method is to assign new meanings to old terms. His method passes the problem by.

David Davis is accused of having lower class roots and being resentful of the public school boys he has found himself working with. He is accused of being unable to deal with coming from a broken home. He is accused of being on the make. He is accused of egoism. He is supposed to be suffering from a mid-to-late-life crisis. The problem is to explain his resignation yesterday. None of these explanations work. He has a long and successful career to prove it. Problem and method pass one another by.

David Davis is accused of giving Labour a gift, letting them off the hook. You can't give a dead body a gift. It's dead. Ask the Guardian. David Davis is accused of harming the Conservative party. He isn't and he can't and he wouldn't – as noted. His accusers, like Frraserr Nelson on Newsnight last night, miss the point.

They miss the point in an important way. They are focusing on Westminster party politics. Tactics and jockeying for position. Civil liberties transcend party politics. That is David Davis's point. Mr Nelson doesn't get it, yet. Dominic Grieve, also on Newsnight, does.

When two or three parties fight a general election in the UK, only one can win. That party has to govern the whole country. There must be something which overcomes the divisions of party differences, something to unify the country, something which transcends those divisions, something shared even by supporters of rival parties. Without that, every general election would be a civil war.

That something is a shared set of principles of civil liberty.

And somehow, with all the political shenanigans of the past 11 years, the UK has become a civil liberties cesspool. Regular Westminster politics has not been doing its job. So some other method must be tried. David Davis is trying one.

His speech was magnificent and his action is heroic. Will his method pass the problem by? Possibly. Westminster methods to date have certainly passed the problem by. They have failed. This might work. We had better bloody well hope it does.

With regard to Rachel Sylevester's hatchet job article - look at the comments.
Predominantly in favour of David Davis, and strongly so. The overwhelming impression I get from the comments is that the electorate see this affair differently to the media, and are infuriated by the media's lack of perspective - Ms Sylvester and her ilk see things in terms of the Westminster hot-house only, and appear deaf to the chord struck by Mr Davis with the electorate at large.

The same is true on the Telegraph and the Guardian blogs.

Political journalists usually talk as though the public are craven and the only thing they understand is money. E.g. Labour lost Crewe and Nantwich because of the 10p debacle. Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe voters were reacting to Labour's abysmal home affairs agenda.

If they weren't then, they certainly are now.

Maybe political journalists will treat people with a little more respect in future. It's extraordinary, but maybe it's not just political journalists – maybe regular people can think as well!

great post ..at least someone is reading the papers!!

Times: Gordon Brown taunts Tories after David Davis 'farce'

Less than 48 hours ago, someone had so many rebels in his own party, he had to rely on another party to get a government bill passed. Now who was that?

Times Comment Central: Why David Davis is wrong
Daniel Finkelstein:


Oh dear. I have had to have words with Mr Finkelstein about how to spot a standard when you see one before.

What I don't understand is why it is so hard to just believe what David Davis is saying. He's doing this because it's something he believes in, and it makes sense. Occam's razor would say that this explanation is true as it's the simplest.

Anything the papers come up with seem to be clutching at straws with no hard evidence showing that these supposed things, e.g. Davis is bitter about Cameron being leader, are true.

Can the media simply not handle an honest politician? Perhaps if the media stopped accusing them of lying all the time, they'd actually start being more honest.

No it isn't. It is part of the job-description of a columnist to be controversial.

The editorial's position is entirely coherent, and much like Nick Robinson. It is quite possible that this is a terrible mistake by DD, and it does derail (though maybe only temporarily) the strategy (its own, as well as the Tories') that had the Government heading for the abyss. Given that its proprietor is having some devilment suggesting the Sun may oppose Davis, then it would be terribly embarrassing for the Times to be on the wrong side.

So it is equivocal about him: its line neither offends the government nor the potential government. And that too is coherent with its editorial line in recent years. It has largely sat on the fence on the broad civil liberties questions.

Guy, you are sounding like a politician...really like a politician.

No, it's the musings of a lawyer which is of course Guy is

David Davis's vain attempt to get civil liberties onto the agenda continued to fail spectacularly today when the Daily Telegraph published only 12 letters on the subject and their two main Saturday columnists both discussed it. Simon Heffer thinks David Davis is an admirable Roundhead and Charles Moore thinks his resignation was pointless, he should have resigned over the Lisbon Treaty, that wouldn't have been pointless.

David Davis will also be feeling the sting of exclusion from the nation's concerns when he sees that of the two Leaders in today's newspaper, only one of them is about him.

The Establishment is circling the wagons, his irrelevant egoism will see him frozen out, rebuked by being ignored. He is destined to wander the world for the rest of his days, a lonely and derided figure of fun. As Simon Heffer says:

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round, but ho, ho, ho look who's laughing now"!

How can the media ignore Mr Davis when he is returned victorious and vindicated to parliament?

The ones destined to roam the world derided and increasingly lonely are New Labour with many of them out of work in a couple of years time.

They don't all sing from the same book I'm glad to say. Matthew Parris echoes almost exactly my thoughts on the subject.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 132953.ece

As for The Sun trying to trivialise it, well that may backfire on them but Davis needs to stand on his own two feet and keep the pressure up. Like I say, if he does break through all the critics and make his point directly to the public then his personal rating will go right up. Then if Cameron forgives him and gives him a shadow cabinet job it will make the Tories look more on the side of the people and less like a cosy club of identical people. I think Boris did the same thing in a way and that worked as well.

I sympathise with Cameron though, he has had a tough time recently and needs nerves of steel to do his job. Mind you if the lead remains strong they should all be happy with themselves. One thing though is that the common pattern is the Tory party is looking more like a collection of individuals and Cameron gives them the rope to say their thing. This seems to work and makes the party look different to Labour. This is good since the British people are themselves individuals, it's a cultural trait and to see a party containing many different personalities is a strong point. Davis's background is a good vote winner for people from similar backgrounds and much like the background of Thatcher who was brought up in a grocery shop. More in touch generally and less of the groupthink of the 'political class'.

I really like this comment, it does seem to be a really strong factor in british culture to have individual opinions, which lead to success and recognition.

Cameron does seem to be doing a good job of keeping it all organized though, David Davis could have come off as the party falling apart, instead it looks like he's just speaking his mind while Cameron still keeps a hold on the situation.

The claim Labour make that the party is in disarray is false. All but one of the Conservative MPs voted with their party, but not so with Labour.

I was impressed by that and it means they have taken on a more libertarian right wing position (which even the Guardian admit to spporting!) America used to have this kind of politic; they had a strong constitution that protected individual liberty and a small state/free market economy. So it is a tried and tested model and one that certainly does not tally with ID cards and a surveillance state. All surveillance states in the past have been large and powerful states, not small ones. So with any luck, when they get into power they will keep to this. It is consistent, it is workable and it will be popular and more democratic.

Cameron has made comments about this before, likening the current situation to 'something of the past' and likening it to the failed centralised Soviet model. I think this has to be considered in the argument since the government information system goes hand in hand with the kind of state they are building. The information system has to be compatible and they are rapidly moving towards a centralised model where all decisions and power moves towards a central command.

Once these principles are recognised its easy to have a party united in a fundamental way. The current government on the other hand are trying to hide the true reasons why we need all of this. This is why they are in disarray and not keeping to the party whip.

We might get a better perspective on how his resignation is being handled by the media after the 'Sundays' have had their go. Hopefully at least some of them will take a more balanced view and state publicly that he is taking a meaningful stand and not just side with the Government in trying to write this off as a 'stunt'.

Did anyone else hear Labour's Hackney MP Diane Abbot speaking in the House during the debate on 42 day detention? Her point was that it was all was being done, not in the interests of Britain's security, as the Government claimed, but entirely for the political motive of 'positioning', to 'make the Tories appear weak on terrorism'.

That about sums up how totalitarian this Government has become. This is a Labour Government now so mired in its own 'control freakery' that its own left wing could easily go and support a Tory in a by-election; he'd probably welcome them and they wouldn't look out of place!

I've always believed that detention without charge for 42 days was a thoroughly bad idea and now that we've got ex Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie threatening to stand against Davis on the issue, I know it is!

Letter to the Guardian yesterday:

It has been said that 9/10 plans Montgomery had were utter madness but the tenth one was genius. This could be the one out of ten that looked similar to all of the rest but... well take a look here!



http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008 ... aviddavis1

I don't quite see what David Davis is hoping to achieve. He is not rebelling against his own party and if the other parties don't contest the by-election, it becomes a non-election with a non-result.

I also think that the Labour 'rebels' are a waste of space. If any one of them had the courage of their convictions, he or she would resign from the Labour Party, then stand as an independent in a by-election, which, assuming Labour put up a candidate in opposition, would at least yield a valid result.

Agreed, there is a problem. Maybe this will help.

Bruce Anderson says in today's Sunday Telegraph that:

Note that bit in the middle, "Parliament worked as it ought to". I guess – and we're all having to guess – that that is the key.

Parliament has "worked as it ought to" for the past 11 years and look where that's got us – RIPA, ID cards, transformational government, eBorders, ePassports, etc ...

Parliament could carry on working as it ought to for another two years or so. What could the government achieve in that time? By way of authoritarianism. Given what they've already achieved.

It doesn't bear thinking about. Something has got to bring a halt to this onslaught on civil liberties. Parliament working as it ought to is not ... working as it ought to. So someone has got to try something different. Whatever that something is must by definition look unconventional – the conventional methods have failed.

Let someone = David Davis. Let something different = resigning your seat to try to stimulate more public debate about civil liberties. He may fail. But there is no difficulty understanding what he is hoping to achieve and why he is doing it. And if you can think of a better way, an entirely democratic better way, please don't keep it to yourself, tell us.

David Davis is simply trying to highlight the questions of civil liberties for public debate because he believes that once the populace are appraised of the true facts without the jingoistic Nimby half truths shrouding the issue the people might, just might, wake up to the fact that civil liberties are important and the steady erosion of them is a dangerous thing.

I know it has been difficult to glean this from David Davis and supporters repeating it over and over again. Are his actions so alien that his plain speaking on the matter simply "does not compute"?

Rachel Sylvester accuses David Davis of:

• being an outsider,
• turning a Labour tragedy into a Conservative farce,
• being self-indulgent and mad, of egotism and of distracting from Labour's woes,
• digging Labour out of a hole,
• putting David Cameron's authority under the spotlight,
• narrowing the Conservatives' broad appeal,
• contracting out policy to Liberty and of starting a fight in which the Conservatives have nothing to gain and everything to lose,
• annoying voters by forcing them to vote when they don't have to and of doing something baffling,
• not being a team player and of being macho,
• being psycholigically flawed and incapable of managing opposition,
• being disloyal to his party leaders,
• being prey to subconscious dark forces acting on his lower class origins in a broken home and of trying to be Superman instead of Clark Kent.

There are many ways to be controversial. This isn't one of them.

There are many ways of avoiding embarrassment. This isn't one of them.

If this is equivocal, I'd hate to see what she writes when she makes her mind up and comes off the fence.

The press have been too harsh on this man. He did a very brave thing but largely the press are nowhere near as bold as he has been. It's a product of groupthink, which is the product of weak-mindedness. It takes guts to do what he has done and his critics have none of their own and so they steadfastly toe the line to an Orwellian state. Extreme times often require extreme measures to get us out of this mess.

The Tory lead has taken a hit because there is a similar section of the public who are gutless and when someone does something heroic it reminds themselves of their own shortcomings, and so they don't like it. However I think this is short-term reacting rather than thinking. Long term I think it will do the Conservatives a lot of good when more realise they have people who will go the whole way to save them from the perils of what is being constructed. This will make them look different from the opposition and capable.

I think Cameron might keep him on the backbenches for a while and when it is all blown over promote him to a ministerial job in time for the election.

I am pleased to tell you quite the reverse has happened.

In the Times

"Tories ride out David Davis storm to set record poll lead"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4138809.ece

Sylvester, the columnist, is philippic; but the editorial line is equivocal.