MEA CULPA CORBYN

Something to smile about

I was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn. I followed the accepted wisdom, which said that you cannot win an election, without appealing to the floating voters in the marginal constituencies, the sort of people for whom the character of the potential Prime Minister is all-important but who often do not know the name of their local MP, I have said in past posts that voting for him was self-indulgent, putting your own priorities above the need to select a leader who could form an effective government.

Actually, I was right about Jeremy Corbyn.  He does not and never will appeal to these voters and it is unlikely that a party led by him would ever win power.  Note to Labour Party - you did not actually win the last election even if it has to be said that you did much better than expected.  Labour led by Corbyn won more seats than when led by Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown or Ed Milliband, who tried to pull Labour back into the middle ground and stay onside with the Daily Mail and the Sun. Corbyn sensibly did not get involved in slanging matches with these papers and just ignored them while they poured increasingly hysterical and ineffective abuse on him, ending up looking pretty silly in the process.

Instead Labour changed the arithmetic by getting young people to vote and for this we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.  At the same time as young people are showing apathy and antipathy towards politics we are moving closer to giving sixteen year olds the vote. This may seem like a nonsense but it is surely better to err on the side of adventure than cynicism, to give them a right and a power, even if they are  unlikely to use it. Corbyn played an effective, humane low-key campaign with that motto ‘For the many not the few’ while his opponents parrot on about the ‘magic money-tree’.  We have not heard it so often since the Grenfell fire in which about eighty died because the private company running the place saved a grant total of £5000 by covering the building with flammable rather than inflammable cladding.  Think about it: that works out at about sixty quid a life for those burnt alive inside.  Some saving.

To allow ourselves a little cynicism, however, Labour did win a lot more seats because of money, which has a far greater impact on peoples’ voting habits than we often like to admit, both in whether they vote and who for.  Corbyn promised students that a government led by him would eliminate tuition fees and he at least gave the impression that it would eliminate student debt altogether.  Bernie Sanders had a similar message in the USA and stayed in the Democratic race far longer than he would have done otherwise.  I come from a generation that was actually paid to go to university in the form of grants from the government (not that any of us said ‘Thank you’, just moaned about their inadequacy).  My own children had to borrow but got through before the fees went up to £9,000 a year giving most student a £25-30,000 debt to go with those letters after their name. Although low income families were supposed to be protected from this, the evidence seems to show that they were put off further education because of a fear of long-term debt, while middle class students thought they could live with it. You certainly tend to earn more if you have a degree and it is not unreasonable to expect people to pay towards this privilege.  

Yet, with higher incomes, they will be paying more in tax anyway in the long run so maybe that could be expected to cover the benefit gained. Notice how Labour won seats in university towns where the student vote was organised and encouraged to turn out.  Idealism is all very well but it took the prospect of saving twenty to thirty grand to actually get many current and ex-students to vote, my daughter amongst them.

Holding the election in term time was not, then, a good idea.  That was only the first of many mistakes by the usually efficient and effective Conservative machine.  Leaders who do not have to campaign for the leadership of their parties, like Gordon Brown and Theresa May, are often out of touch with their MPs and followers because they have not had to win their support the hard way and think that they rule by divine right.  May had seemed a cool customer until put under pressure when she made several mistakes like refusing to debate with opponents or engage with voters, surrounding herself with yes-men and women and looking weak as a result.

The biggest boo-boo, however, was surely the so-called dementia tax, whereby people were told that the high value of their houses should go towards paying for their care in old age.  Again, this is not entirely unreasonable but it means that, if you have a heart-attack and drop dead at sixty, you pass on your estate intact whereas, if you go gaga gradually, your inheritance will be whittled away to pay for nurses who clear up your droolings.  So, while Corbyn was energising student voters by promising them freedom from debt, potential May-supporters were put off voting for her in case she took away their savings. 

Bad move, Theresa.   You wanted an increased majority to push Brexit through and ended up mortally-wounded. The first sign that things were not going to go to plan was that lady Brenda from Bristol who was appalled at the idea of yet another election.  While Theresa struggles to look like she is in charge of Brexit and passes thinly-disguised bribes to Ulster bigots, Jeremy soaks up the adulation of the crowds at Glastonbury.  My friend Simon Rodway, an unreconstructed leftie and Corbyn fan, sadly died before this election, having hoped to live to see him reach Downing Street.  I still don’t think it will ever happen (if you are reading this in Heaven) and I think Blair would have walked this election. Despite this I feel optimistic and hopeful, glad that the British gave the government a bloody nose. If there is one thing you should never do it is to take the people for granted.    

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com. Edwin Lerner

LOCK HER UP?

Lavinia Woodward - should she be locked up?

The name of Lavinia Woodward may not ring a bell immediately - and I dare say she hopes to retreat back to obscurity soon enough - but her case does highlight the double standards found in the way men and women are treated by the law, by the state and by the media.  

Woodward gained her fifteen minutes of fame after hitting and stabbing her ex-boyfriend while high on drugs and then escaping a jail sentence because the judge knew that a custodial sentence would damage her career prospects - destroy them, in fact, because she was a medical student who was expected to become a surgeon and we do not, apparently, allow people who go to jail for cutting people to later cut up other people in an operating theatre.  She has suffered the usual shaming on social media and has now left Facebook.

A few things come out of this case.  First, that we are an unforgiving society even if we pay lip service to idea of rehabilitation.  This is a trend exacerbated rather than counteracted by the internet.  Lavinia, as I will call her, can ignore social media now but the internet will forever have a record of her crime and conviction.  The word on the street is that it is getting harder to rehabilitate people these days because, even if their crime has long since been erased from the official records, a quick google search will tell a potential employer that Joe Bloggs or Jane Doe served time twenty years ago and, therefore, will not be trusted with a job, even if they have turned over a new leaf and rebuilt their lives completely.  

Second, having good career prospects will help you.  The judge in Lavinia's case (male) may well have had a daughter of her age and thought how his little girl might have gone off the rails and deserves a second chance.  This is unlikely to have been a factor in his thinking if she had been an unemployed badly qualified no-hoper.  As someone who believes you should be judged by what you do with your hands rather than by what goes on in your head I cannot endorse this, although I suspect I would have felt the same way as the judge having a daughter just a little older than Lavinia.  (A well-behaved, law-abiding one, I hasten to add, who needs no favours from anyone.) Even men who openly support gender equality have a tendency to be supportive of vulnerable females and have an age-old inclination to protect them from harm.

Thirdly, they are much less likely to exercise this inclination if the object of their mercy is male - and black.  If Lavinia had been Laverne he would have been less likely to enjoy such leniency.  The gender preference is probably stronger here than the racial one, although this is unpredictable.  A young black woman might have enjoyed the same treatment as Lavinia, a white male would have been less likely to do so.

In fact, does anyone imagine that, if a man attacked a woman with a knife and gave her a cut that needed stitches, he would have escaped jail whatever his career prospects?  Even if he had received the same treatment as Lavinia and been kept out of jail, you can just imagine the outcry from people who highlight domestic violence as a major scandal in our society.  Instead of being considered mildly, possibly foolishly indulgent of human weakness a male judge who failed to send a man to prison for stabbing a female partner would have been condemned as complacent, misogynistic and irresponsible.  

I share some of this attitude.  Women do need protection from violent men and I feel instinctively that a woman behind bars is an affront in a civilised society. The title of this post comes from the chant that Donald Trump's supporters made whenever he mentioned Hilary Clinton.  I hated these chants, which the Donald did nothing to discourage, knowing that they could help him get into the White House by energising his cruder supporters.  Something gallant in me shudders at the idea of locking up women for having the nerve to try and serve in high office and, if the Donald is now struggling and way out of his depth in the White House, it is hard to have much sympathy with him.

Melania - should she be set free?

One woman who seems to be locked up now is the third Mrs Trump, Melania.  She did a decent job of boosting her husband's campaign - with a good deal of help provided by her predecessor  Michelle Obama whose speech she shamelessly ripped off - but she does not seem happy to be on the winning side and her refusal to hold her husband's hand recently speaks volumes about their relationship.  Marina Hyde in the Guardian cattily suggested that she was waiting for Stockholm syndrome to kick in - the syndrome in which the kidnapped start to side with the kidnappers.  Maybe Melania is the one who needs her freedom more than Lavinia.


  

IS THE QUEEN WORTH IT?

HM - value for money?

People who are in favour of equality often get more worked up about wealth than poverty.  It is the huge houses with solid gold bath taps, the expensive cars and Swiss bank accounts that exercise them more than the family struggling to put food on the table and clothes on their children. Conspicuous consumption is just that – far more conspicuous than the problems of poverty and thus more likely to provoke anger.

When it comes to wealth no-one shows it off more than the royal family.  They wear expensive ornate clothes on special occasions and always look well-dressed at even ordinary events.  Soldiers who guard the Queen at the royal palaces have to wear colourful specially made uniforms to do so.  The Queen rides in a gold carriage to open parliament, the beating heart of our democracy, wearing a crown encrusted with diamonds which the vast majority of her people could not afford.  They have it and they flaunt it, so the royal family becomes the target of many of those who want to promote a fairer society.

This is understandable but I think mistaken.  How much does the Queen actually cost us?  The Sovereign Grant, which replaced the Civil List five years ago, currently stands at just over £42 million a year, which comes to sixty two pence per citizen, or around one pound per taxpayer (defining a taxpayer as one who pays income tax).  When I am working as a tourist guide I usually say that, if you asked the British people whether they would like a pound back on their income tax if it meant losing the Queen, the vast majority would reply emphatically ‘No!’ – especially as they would never actually get their pounds back.

Republicans argue that The Sovereign Grant does not represent the true cost of the royal family because it does not factor in the expenses of royal engagements, which are met by local and national government. It has been argued that the real cost of royalty is around £350 million a year.  However, this figure is suspiciously similar to the weekly amount that the Brexit campaign said would be saved if we left the European Union.  It did not factor in the amount we receive from the Union but just stacked up all the conceivable costs without considering the benefits.  In fact, if you look at the earning potential of having a royal family, the balance sheet looks very different because it undoubtedly brings in a huge amount in tourism revenue.  This is not an overriding argument in favour of royalty: it has to be justified intellectually rather than financially, in its own right rather than as a way of making money. Stonehenge would still attract tourists if it was situated in the United Republic rather than the United Kingdom, just as bridges and community centres would have to be opened by someone, whether they were president or monarch.

The debate about the details goes on but it is the principle of whether we have a royal family that is important, whatever the real cost of it.  I would argue in favour if only because those who believe in equality must surely concede that this must entail everyone having a vote on the issue in one of these referendums we are so keen on nowadays.  There can be little doubt that, if we did have a vote on the issue the British people would choose overwhelmingly to retain the royal family.  There is not much point in having equality if you do not give people an equal say.

In fact, I would go farther and say that the royal family is actually a kind of socialist institution.  It is paid for by all and can be enjoyed by all.  Many of the things we finance with our taxes, such as roads, education and healthcare, are used far more by people on above average incomes who tend to drive cars, encourage their children to go to university and make better use of the NHS.  It is poorer people who have to use public transport, leave school early and get stuck at the end of long waiting lists.  Yet they can enjoy the royal family and all the pomp and ceremony that goes with it as much as anybody else.  You do not have to pay a penny to watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace or to join the crowds and cheer when a royal wedding takes place.  In the same way, you do not have to visit the National Gallery or the British Museum.  These are free activities enjoyed by British and overseas tourists alike and paid for through taxation.  Yet it is the colour and pageantry of the guard change which attracts many people on low incomes rather than the more intellectual pleasures of our fine free museums.

By all means keep the museums free.  Goodness knows, we spend public money on less worthwhile institutions.  But let us leave some money aside for retaining the royal family.  It is what we do in Britain and we do it well.  Very few countries in the world have managed to retain a monarchy while developing a democracy.  No monarch has anything like the same recognition and affection that the Queen commands with approval ratings that politicians would kill for.  If it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.  Or, in modern speak, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner