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PM to allow free vote on parts of embryo bill | Politics | guardian.co.uk

Remember the glory days of Tony Blair? Say what? Blair the spinner, Blair the man with the smile no-one trusted, Blair the man who presided (and I do mean presided) over the Iraq debacle? But, the thing is, however much we might (and did) disagree with Blair’s policies and actions, he fitted the bill of Prime Minister quite well, while Gordon Brown was an effective chancellor. With Blair gone, we have a chancellor in the prime minister’s shoes, and a second-stringer as chancellor.

Nothing shows Brown’s inability to lead the country more than the debacle over a free vote on embryology. At the most profound level, this is a more serious misjudgement than the phoney election of September. At that time, as we recall, Brown waited too long before deciding that he wasn’t really going to win, and gave David Cameron a much needed (but entirely undeserved) boost. It was a tactical decision, and Brown waited too long, until there was no right answer, and he was left making the best of a bad job.

On the embryology question, though, it is not a question of waiting too long before conceding that MPs should have a free vote on the ‘ethical’ aspects.

Quite simply, there should never have been a question of whipping MPs on an issue of fundamental conscience. Whether Catholic cardinals have been misleading MPs or not (as one Labour peer is alleging), parliamentarians were being instructed that their consciences could play no role in one of the most profound ethical questions ever to come before a British parliament.

As far as I understand it - and I’m not someone with a huge axe to grind on this issue - the main argument for permitting new levels of experimentation in embryology is an economic one: if we don’t take the lead in the new technology, then other countries will, and Britain will be left behind. I’m not really sure I understand how this argument stacks up when we seem so keen to disinvest in other aspects of British technological leadership that have a much faster return for far less ethical issues. The main argument against it is that we are delving into areas into which man is not meant to delve. Again, I’m not sure that this is as clear cut as some people are suggesting.

What I am sure about, though, is that the discussion and the decision should be and must be in the hands of MPs themselves. Government simply does not have the authority to dictate conscience to individual members. If it did have that authority, then our general elections would be nothing more or less than presidential elections - though without the balancing of Congress and Senate which they have in the USA. As a nation, we would collectively decide, once every few years, to invest our entire ethical, moral, economic and political future in a single individual, until that individual decided to step down or to call a fresh election.

Once we allow that the government can require MPs to vote in a particular direction on a matter of the meaning of life itself, then we really can hold nothing back. There is then no reason why Gordon Brown should not, at the end of his term of office, require MPs to vote for an arbitrary extension of parliament. That, after all, would merely be a matter of a technical change to our voting arrangements.

Now, of course, Gordon Brown would never do that: he understands the political process. He also understands that a lurch towards dictatorship (which is what it would be) would see investors clamouring to get their assets off-shore, destabilising the one thing that Brown really does understand - the economy.

But this simply makes it all the more clear that Brown is in the wrong job - he lacks the fundamental moral judgement to recognise that the issue at hand is exactly the matter of conscience in which a free vote is the only option.

I quite enjoyed living in the Brown economy. Taxes were quite low (especially when compared to under the previous Tory administration), inflation was low, interest rates were low. I now have the sense that the firm hand at the tiller is missing, just as we are headed into stormier waters.

I was never a big fan of Blair - but I recognised and respected his qualities. Blair would never have made the categorical moral misjudgement that Brown has made.

Economic instability we have weathered before. But the complete lack of leadership and moral judgement which Brown shows as Prime Minister is alarming. I suppose I could do the traditional opposition thing and call for him to go. But if he went, who in Labour would have the authority to step into his place? Jack Straw is a good man, but Straw in charge would be like having your maths teacher running the country. Messrs Miliband, Miliband, Hutton, and Darling are entirely uninspiring. Blears, Balls and Burnham would struggle to get anyone to take them seriously. In fact, reading through the cast list of Brown’s cabinet is like reading through a copy of Who Isn’t Who, or the list of extras in a BBC daytime TV drama.

Seriously, it’s time for a general election.

The party rallied round Nick Clegg this weekend at the Liberal-Democrat national conference in Liverpool. His hour long speech without notes proved he had the charisma to take the party forwards. And, crucially, his call to mend broken politics rang true in a way which David Cameron’s call the other week rang false. Nick Clegg really is putting forward a radical new vision of politics. David Cameron is doing no more than looking for reasons why people should support him to climb onto the rocking punt of what there is right now. Cameron has absolutely no intention of mending broken politics. Clegg has a programme and a plan to accomplish it.

Speaking personally, I had my busiest two day conference yet, speaking at fringe meetings on multi-culturalism and reconciliation, and chairing candidates’ briefings by Vince Cable (yes, that Vince Cable), Chris Huhne and Ed Davey. All good stuff.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Senior Lib Dems quit over EU vote

The Lisbon treaty vote was always going to be a tricky moment for the Liberal Democrats, because it hinged on point of conscience where two slightly different readings of the facts led to three possible answers. The Conservative line (apart from our old friend Kenneth Clarke), was that the treaty was fundamentally the same as the constitution which they had promised a referendum on. The Labour line was that it was a treaty not a constitution, and deserved no more special treatment than any of the other treaties. Whichever way you look at it, these are rather fine-print readings: is a treaty really the same as a constitution? The Tories made great play before the election of “a country has a constitution, not a club, and I don’t want to be part of a country called Europe” - which was always slightly bizarre, because clubs do have constitutions, whereas at least one country - Britain - does not have a written constitution. They could argue that the content of the treaty was largely the same as that of the constitution, but their exact point, which was that the EU shouldn’t have a constitution, was no longer at issue.

But Labour’s reading was also rather fine (in the sense of a small distinction - not in the sense of a fine day). When it was put to them that they had promised a referendum on this issue, they argued that the content of the treaty was sufficiently different as not to warrant a referendum. But who decides when the content has moved sufficiently? Labour never presented a tipping point at which they would offer a referendum.

Nick Clegg’s solution was to call for a vote on membership of the EU, and to abstain on this particular vote. His argument was that abstention is not a ‘don’t know’, but a positive statement. Yet this, too, is a fine reading: most people do regard an abstention as a ‘don’t know’ or ‘not bothered’. Certainly at election time we urge people to go out and vote. Clegg would argue that he got his troops out to vote, but to vote abstain.

For Tim Farron and Alistair Carmichael, and thirteen other Lib-Dems, this was all too much. As conscience politicians, they felt that they really had promised a referendum, and the substantive issue was not sufficiently different to make a difference. Farron has not argued that he is right and Clegg is wrong - it is not a slap in the face for the party - but has decided that his personal conscience, perhaps supplemented by additional promises he may have made during his election campaign, did not permit him to do anything but vote for a referendum.

This was always going to be a tricky moment for the Lib-Dems, because it simultaneously showed them at their best - men and women of conscience - and at their worst - a party which can be split by a carefully crafted knife-edge which leaves some consciences on one side and some on the other.

For now, the issue is unimportant. The government won its vote, and there will be no referendum, unless the Lords decide that they do have the power to overturn it. But Liberal Democrats need to carefully consider how they should in future face issues which divide them, together.

BBC NEWS | Wales | ‘Mend broken politics’ - Cameron

David Cameron has made a speech in which he bewails the lack of trust the nation places in politics and politicians. He is right to do so. He wants to ‘Mend broken politics’. A noble ambition. But he is the wrong person to do it. David Cameron, who will not come clean on his misuse of drugs as a student, who caused a photograph of himself at the head of a pack of drunken diners in Oxford to be withdrawn from circulation because of the image it painted of him (an accurate one), who engaged in nothing more than the politics of the playground in Tony Blair’s last months, who has demanded the toughest penalties for unproven allegations against Labour members, but dithered for 24-hours before withdrawing the whip from Derek Conway when there was no doubt about the case - this David Cameron is in no position to lecture the nation on mending broken politics.

This is the David Cameron who bewails Labour’s spin, but decided to have himself photographed cycling to work to save the environment, while a van drove behind him with his files inside (we should recall that the van was not supposed to appear in the photographs). This is the David Cameron who, in his work on an earlier Tory manifesto, was a man of the right wing, who now poses as a liberal, a centrist, a green, clean and friendly neighbourhood handy-man, ready with a hammer, some nails and a lick of fresh (green) paint to fix the fences that naughty Labour have broken down.

I’m no fan of Labour. I’m no fan of their centralising vision of government, their arbitrary imposition of the will of the towns onto the countryside, and their failure to take responsibility for the mess of half-truths and half-baked ideas that took us into Iraq.

But the corrosive style of politics that we have seen persistently erode public confidence in public figures is more a result of Cameron and his predecessors, Messrs Howard, Duncan-Smith and Hague. Cameron is strong only in sniping and jeering. We have yet to see a coherent set of policies for how he would run the nation. More importantly, we have yet to see any coherence between the values he claims to have now, and the values he appeared to live by before he was in the public eye. Yes, of course he is careful now. If he were not careful, he would never have been elected as Tory leader. But in the years when other people were volunteering to work at the Oxford night shelter, or counselling other students, or going off to work for charities and unpaid voluntary organisations, what was Cameron doing?

In an interview with Channel 4, David Cameron is recorded to have said that he had not taken Class A drugs since being elected to Parliament in 2001. This is extraordinary. Is this the best that he can possibly say for himself?

Pressed on drug use on Question Time, he is recorded to have said “I’m allowed to have had a private life before politics in which we make mistakes and we do things that we should not and we are all human and we err and stray.” Yes, quite possibly. We all did things as small children which we are ashamed of. But Cameron was punished at Eton for cannabis use. If he had been brought up in the area where I was brought up, and his parents had not had the power to protect him, he might quite conceivably have gone to prison for this. Legally speaking, it is clear that he engaged in criminal behaviour. Should we simply gloss over this? Perhaps. But the evidence is that he continued to use drugs at Oxford. Should we gloss over that? Not to my mind. I don’t ever recall meeting David Cameron at Oxford - I’m fairly sure he wasn’t a member of the Christian Union! I wonder if I ever saw him drunk in the streets with his dining club pals. At this distance, it is hard to tell. But I do recall absolutely that at Oxford, in those years, we considered ourselves to be adults, responsible for our own actions. That responsibility does not fade with time. But if the best that he can claim is that he has not used Class A drugs since 2001, and he made that claim in 2005, then all he has really said is that he has been clean for four years.

It is absolutely essential that politics in Britain is cleaned up. In fact, I am firmly of the opinion that a whole generation of MPs of the ilk of Derek Conway have to go. A Tory councillor recently confided in me that there were many more such as he, he merely had the misfortune to be caught. Giving those MPs a lick of paint, and parcelling them off to the back benches is insufficient. One of those MPs who should go is David Cameron. Perhaps with regret, perhaps with a sense of irony for a man who could have been much more if he had lived a law-abiding life from the days of his ‘wake-up call’ at Eton. But if Mr Cameron really wishes to mend broken politics, then his greatest contribution will be to leave it.