Politics 101: Fees, poems and pledges

We live, worse luck, in interesting political times. Not just with the economic situation forcing everyone out of their "jam today and forever" comfort zone, but with the coalition muddling everyone up about what is party policy, what is government policy and who is speaking with which hat on and when. It seems to be no easier for those actually involved in the thing.

Mario Cuomo* famously compared the promises of an election with the realities of government by saying that politicians "campaign in poetry and govern in prose. I'd have to say that 26 years on the difference is probably even more stark; the 24 hour media cycle and the need for snappy soundbites and messaging has replaced the flowery political romance poetry of yesteryear with the snappy, efficient haikus that seem to make up political debate in what we can no longer call The Noughties.

And the Lib Dems have come a cropper on this one this week. Admittedly it was brought about by the carefully-positioned landmine of the Browne Report, timed by Labour to go off well after the election when they had a hunch it would have become someone else's problem, but nevertheless a cropper we did come.

I have long felt that the Lib Dem commitment to scrapping tuition fees was out of date or at best a political haiku. Student fees are no longer the pay-as-you-enter abomination they were when they first came in, when they genuinely were regressive and a disincentive for young people from poor families. Today's students were not even in school when Blair and Brown brought them in and so cannot argue as my generation could that the introduction of fees was a rug being pulled from under us. And also, although Labour never reached its planned and ridiculous target of sending 50% of all school-leavers to university, the numbers going into Higher Education mean that making courses free again is simply not a viable option.

Students suffer serious hardships and the whole system needs a radical overhaul, but the Lib Dem policy on fees - a great 14 syllable message as it may be in a campaign - seems to me simplistic and out of date. Many of the Browne Report's recommendations are moving in the right direction.

Having written all of the preceding, my next point may seem counterintuitive. When the Brown recommendations come before the House of Commons, Liberal Democrat MPs must vote against them.

Why? Simple. Because they said they would.

Interesting times. Governing in prose. We're all in this together. Maybe so, but the other political haiku circling around the coalition is one of Nick Clegg's own - the New Politics.

Much like New Labour, the Big Society or British Jobs for British Workers, the New Politics is deliberately a sufficiently vague phrase that is can encapsulate a whole raft of ideas and yet definitively mean very little. It's been used to refer to electoral reform and electing the Upper House, to the cross-party approach of coalition government and any number of other things, but the one thing the New Politics is meant to be about is a renewed relationship of trust between politicians and the electorate.
That's where the whole thing was born, remember? After the expenses scandal, phone tapping, Cash for Honours, Lobbying Lords and The Duck House Parliament we were promised a new start and politics we could trust and the man who made himself the face of that was Nick Clegg.

There are bound to be practicalities - Lib Dem ministers might have to be "unwell" or find themselves inexplicably stuck on the Jubilee Line during the vote to avoid breaking cabinet rules, but backbench Lib Dem MPs must fulfill the promise they made to the voters which helped many of them win their seats in May.

All 57 Lib Dems promised the voters they would oppose a rise in student fees. There is nothing more important in politics - new or old - than that.

* Google says it was him. As ever, I'm open to other bids.

What the Woolas?

When Phil Woolas went up against Joanna Lumley on live national television over Labour's refusal to recognise Gurkha rights I knew damn well whose side I was on. Even if the man had never surfaced in the public eye again I would stand by my choice.

Woolas was Labour candidate in what commentators at the time called "the dirtiest by-election in history" and has been MP for Oldham East since 1997. In that time he and his divisive political tactics have contributed to the 2001 Oldham race riots, the borough becoming for a time one of the BNP's strongest areas in the country and a legacy of ethnic tension and segregation that is still being carefully unravelled by Oldham's now-Lib Dem administration. His 2010 election campaign in which he suggested his Liberal Democrat opponent was in the pay of extremist Islam and which had an intended strategy of "making white folks angry" has now landed him in court and could well result in him being thrown out of office next month. 

So what on earth is this man doing back on the Labour front bench - and in a role shadowing the Home Office to boot?
As if it wasn't enough that Labour's new shadow Home Secretary is Ed Balls, one of the most right-wing ministers in the last government, we now have a man who might as well be campaigning for the BNP as his wingman. 

If Ed Miliband is really serious about the mood music he used in his conference speech, that seemed to be aimed squarely at winning back voters who have switched to the Lib Dems over issues like Iraq or civil liberties, he'll have to do better than this.