Ex-UKIP MEP admits UKIP’s climate policy is “very amateurish”

An exclusive story from EurActiv:

An ex-UK Independence Party (UKIP) MEP says that the party’s climate change scepticism was callow and so eccentric that party press officers often had to contradict the views of its climate spokesman, Lord Monckton.

“The policy was very rudimentary and their [climate change] position was very amateurish,” said Marta Andreasen, who left UKIP to join the Conservatives in February.

“Climate change is not a reality for UKIP,” she added.

The more you hear about UKIP, the more you realise what a shambles it is. So the question is why it has become so popular. The grumpy old right-wing Daily Express-reading vote can account for only part of it.

The main reason UKIP can thrive is that the three mainstream parties are all converging on an illusory ‘centre ground’ (as discussed previously here, here and here), with a similar non-ideological and managerialist approach, and so appear indistinguishable to voters. The Liberal Democrats, in losing the ‘protest vote’, seem to have forgotten why so many voters were disillusioned with the political system and protested in the first place.

Coming soon: new edition of Liberator magazine

The new edition of Liberator magazine is at the printers and subscribers will receive it next week. More details of the new edition’s contents will appear on this blog shortly.

To make sure you receive your copy, subscribe here.

Next up: the minimum wage

Unlike our report on electoral reform yesterday, this is no joke. The government’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which I seem to recall has two Liberal Democrat ministers in it) is worried the minimum wage may be too high.

Well, let’s have a look at the minimum wage. The rate for people aged 21 or over is currently £6.19 per hour. Does that sound too high to you? How would you know? You are probably middle class and think in terms of an annual salary, so let’s convert it into terms you will understand. Assuming a 40-hour week and paid holidays, £6.19 X 40 X 52 = £12,875. For people aged 18 to 20, the minimum wage is £4.98 per hour. £4.98 X 40 X 52 = £10,358. But these annual amounts are a best-case scenario since, for many low-paid people, work is often casual and holidays not always paid.

There is an argument that the minimum wage harms the economy and here is Jo Swinson (who ought to know better) making it:

Employment minister Jo Swinson said in February: “The level of employment is now above its pre-recession peak, but the employment rate is below the pre-recession peak.

“This means that we believe that caution is required – particularly as the minimum wage rate is now at its highest ever level relative to average earnings for adults, and remains high for young people.”

She is motivated by a fear that the minimum wage acts as a disincentive to job creation, but that is only the case if your job creation strategy is a race to the bottom on wages. Taken to its logical extreme, the government could eliminate unemployment tomorrow if it eliminated pay altogether.

Meanwhile, depressing pay levels can only harm the economy. First, low-paid people must spend what they have – they don’t have a surplus to save – so their income goes straight into the local economy to buy goods and services, which helps the economy. Second, the lower pay levels are, the more the government has to subsidise stingy employers in the form of Income Support. Leaving aside the arguments about unemployment benefits, surely anyone in full-time work should be paid enough to live on?

But then these arguments will cut little ice with those for whom austerity is more of a religion than a rational policy.

Postscript: The Living Wage Foundation has calculated the living wage for both London and the rest of the UK. For London, it is £8.55 per hour and for the rest of the UK £7.45. Converted to annual salary equivalents, that is (£8.55 X 40 X 52 =) £17,784 and (£7.45 X 40 X 52 =) £15,496 respectively, in both cases more than the statutory minimum wage. So, Jo Swinson, still worried that the minimum wage is “high”?

Is Britain a more liberal society?

Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer has his doubts:

Tolerance of gender, sexual and racial differences is certainly much greater today. But can Britain be described as a more liberal society after a month that has seen all parties support legislation that will effectively license the press, and a second bill introducing secret hearings in civil cases pass through the Lords, with Liberal Democrat peers whipped to oppose amendments that were designed to support open and natural justice? I’ll come to the Lib Dems later, but the short answer is no.

There have been gains and losses in recent decades. Nowadays, we accept gay rights and people can say f**k on television. But more fundamental liberties are being sacrificed:

Things are happening that would have been unimaginable to democrats across the political spectrum 30 years ago. Personal rights have expanded and tolerance undeniably has increased, but at the same time we are behaving as though liberty were a limitless resource that can be endlessly compromised without loss to the individual, or to the sum total of rights that define our free society.

Porter said “I’ll come to the Lib Dems later” and he does:

That the Liberal Democrat party lost or betrayed its principles so quickly in government is, I suppose, to be expected, and I have to confess to very little surprise when I read Nick Clegg’s weaselly speech on immigration, which seemed to proclaim tolerance yet contained the subsonic message of rightwing dog-whistle politics. With every day that passes, he looks more and more like a member of Blair’s second administration home affairs team.

The problem is that as the liberal voice is all but disappearing from parliament we have a generation of leaders in their 40s who will seem almost indistinguishable to future historians. Clegg’s betrayal of liberal values was simply part of the process of his becoming a member of the pragmatic, basically non-ideological, homogenised governing class, which on these issues of liberty moves in lockstep.

British politics these days is reminiscent of beer in the 1970s, when the big brewers almost destroyed Britain’s brewing culture and the wide variety of beers. They wanted to replace them with a few bland, homogenised, TV-advertised keg beers such as Double Diamond, Courage Tavern and Watney’s Red Barrel. They would have succeeded were it not for CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale), which led a revival of craft brewing.

The blithe dismissal of civil liberties is the Watney’s Red Barrel of politics. We don’t just need a campaign for civil liberties. We need a Campaign for Real Politics.

Clegg to abandon electoral reform?

Following Nick Clegg’s affront to Liberal Democrat members with his support for secret courts and a tougher line on immigration, we speculated last week that the third offence in this sequence would be the ‘Snoopers Charter’. But something else has turned up.

Clegg will today slaughter another sacred cow when he announces the abandonment of the party’s long-held commitment to electoral reform. Liberator has seen an advance copy of a speech that Clegg will deliver this morning at an event hosted by the right-of-centre think tank Policy Exchange.

The speech starts off with some fine words about the importance of constitutional reform and rebuilding people’s trust in the political system. But about halfway through, Clegg drops this bombshell:

My party will always advocate an electoral system that respects the wishes of every voter. But, at the last election, we promised to introduce a system of fairer votes. We said we would introduce proportional representation and expressed a preference for the single transferable vote.

We felt it was an honest and pragmatic solution to the problem of people’s lack of trust in politicians. Better surely, we asked, to introduce a fairer system of voting so that the House of Commons would more accurately reflect popular opinion.

But, despite the policy’s aims, it was seen by many people as a reward for parties that came third. Or sometimes even lower. And so it risked undermining public confidence in the electoral system. The very public confidence that is essential to building a democratic Britain. That is why I am no longer convinced this specific policy should be retained in our manifesto for the next General Election.

So I have asked Lord John Sharkey, who did such a sterling job running the AV referendum campaign, to lead a review of this and our other constitutional policies in the run up to 2015.

Strictly speaking, of course, Clegg isn’t formally altering party policy. But as with last week’s speech on immigration, any nuances will be lost. Phrases like “I am no longer convinced” and calls for a “review” will be interpreted by the media as a definitive change of policy.

Members of the party’s Federal Policy Committee were told about the speech last week but were not shown its contents. However, during preliminary discussions on the party’s next manifesto, they were informed that Clegg feels the results of the AV referendum in 2011 have pushed the issue off the table for the foreseeable future and that the party should concentrate its campaigning elsewhere.

Liberator understands that opinion among Clegg’s advisers remains divided. The ‘doves’ are arguing that electoral reform of some unspecified kind – though not AV – should be retained in the manifesto but that it should not be given any great emphasis. The ‘hawks’ believe that, with the public having shown its view so emphatically two years ago, Clegg should bow to the weight of opinion, rule out any form of PR and come out explicitly in favour of first-past-the-post.

Although, on the face of it, the tentative wording of the speech suggests that the doves have won this argument, the spinning going on behind the scenes indicates that the real winners are the hawks. Their agenda seems to be to maintain the coalition with the Tories beyond 2015.

The hawks have been briefing journalists recently that Clegg’s experience of working closely in government with the Conservatives has opened his eyes to the merits of their point of view on this and several other key issues, including secret courts and immigration. They are saying that, after five years in a coalition, the public expects to see the Liberal Democrats take a series of positions closer to the Conservatives. They add that getting proportional representation out of the way will help cement voters’ views of the party as a slightly more moderate and sensible version of the Conservatives, which is the political space Clegg wants to occupy.

Clegg’s support for secret courts and his populist position on immigration suggest that such a strategy is already being implemented. Further evidence is that Clegg has asked his adviser Julian Astle to conduct market research on a possible slogan for the 2015 election campaign, with one front-runner being ‘Liberal Democrats – the conservative party for thinking people’.

The dropping of electoral reform will cause deep unease within the Liberal Democrats, given the long attachment of many members to this cause. Indeed, today’s speech is bound to spark another internal row, probably even greater than the one over secret courts. The dispute will fester until the party’s autumn conference, where the Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Reform, in a rare show of unity, are already planning to submit a motion reaffirming party policy in favour of STV. The leadership will doubtless try every trick in the book to keep such a motion off the conference agenda, possibly by substituting a more anodyne motion of their own. If these manoeuvres fail and an uncompromising pro-PR motion is debated, the leadership will struggle to defeat it since it will attract the votes of most delegates, apart from those who have died of boredom after having STV explained to them by people in yellow sweatshirts.

In any event, we should know the truth of Clegg’s intentions by noon today.