Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

CCTV and civil liberties

Tim Montgomerie posts a defence of CCTV cameras by Gavin Barwell the Croydon Tory candidate and a major Tory campaign player over the last decade.

And the comment thread underneath it captures very well an emerging Tory debate on crime prevention and civil liberties.

Worth reading.

Bernard Gray's challenge to the Tories

Anyone interested in efficiency in public services will want to read Bernard Gray this morning.

I thought this set out the challenge for the Tories quite nicely:

The incentives at work within the public services are partly to blame. It is easier for managers to cut services rather than to try to find innovative ways of providing the same with less money.

Faced with less cash, the obvious answer for a manager is to close this NHS walk-in centre or that after-school club; to reduce the number of ships in the Navy or cut investment in transport.

By contrast, innovation often cuts across existing ways of working or challenges entrenched powerbases.

A frontline manager who proposes to cut department-wide administration rather than local services will often be suggesting that his bosses be sacked, and that is rarely a way to win promotion.

The key thing will be to provide incentives to public servants to help maintain or even improve outcomes at lower cost. 

John Major, Neil Kinnock and party political broadcasts

On Wednesday night I helped my old friend Charles Lewington launch a wonderful new film on the history of party political broadcast that has been produced by the British Film Institute with the support of Charles's comms firm Hanover.

You can see an amusing trailer for it here. And you can buy a copy for £14.95 (with £10 of this going to the Dimbleby cancer charity) by emailing PPB_DVD@hanovercomms.com .

Intercut with the fabulous footage are very striking contemporary interviews, the most striking being with Neil Kinnock.

He is reviewing the famous John Major "Journey" broadcast and the moment when the former PM passes his old house and turns in the car to ask whether it is still there.

Lord Kinnock is laughing as he describes it.

He says that John Major was wearing "a button down shirt, I noticed", adding "from Marks and Spencer I noticed".  And he says that most people watching that moment will have been heard in the street shouting "bulls***t".

How extraordinary.

Its nearly two decades later and Niel Kinnock still doesn't get it.

He doesn't see what a potent political character John Major was in 1992, how most people were not saying "bulls***t" at all. And how and M&S shirt was an advantage.

Islamic Schools: The advice David Cameron needed

If I had been helping David Cameron prepare for PMQs, here's the advice I would have given him.

Actors have a rule - never work with animals and children.

As a political adviser I developed a rule - never cite real people.

In my first week as Director of the Conservative Research Department - and thankfully (purely fortuitously) as a result of work done just before I got there - Brian Mawhinney used a CRD attack on the Camden Asian Women's Hopscotch Association.

It was then revealed that this was a respectable group that helped battered women and had Princess Anne as its patron.

I wouldn't say this happened every time we mentioned a real place or a real person, but it happened on an unaccceptably large proportion of occassions.

Damilola Taylor, Tony Martin, Darcy Bussell - it always went wrong when real people were mentioned.

Even when we used a lion on a poster, a story appeared variously suggesting it was gay (presumably from a gay pride) or a manic depressive lion. 

Labour had it with Jennifer's Ear, IDS with Rose Addis. And now DC has it with the school.

Real people? They're a nightmare.

How to read the latest polling data

Anthony Wells of UK Polling Reports provides his usual (and invaluable) service. He dissects the latest Ipsos Mori poll.

You can read his entire analysis here.

But in a nutshell he says:

In conclusion, while a lot of the massive shift in voting intentions in this poll appeares to be down to sample variation, there’s a modest firming of the Labour vote too. We should still wait for some more polls to see whether that itself is real, and whether other companies also pick up a firming of the Labour vote.

I wouldn’t, however, expect any company using political weighting to show quite such a narrowing of the lead.

Why the Tories' Jedward advert is a mistake

I  was deeply unimpressed by the Conservative poster advert that went up yesterday after the X Factor.

Here it is:

This was a mistake for four reasons.

First, the Conservative campaign should be positive rather than negative. People already know that they don't want to vote Labour, they want to know whether they should vote Conservative.

Second, if this advice is to be ignored and a negative poster is made, it should make an argument rather than an insult if it wants to influence anybody.

Third, it is worse than that. An insult is not merely a waste of time (because it isn't positive and doesn't influence people), it may actually put them off. 

When people see campaign messages it impacts on their view of the people behind the poster much more than on the subject of the attack. This poster does not make Labour seem more or less deadwood. It makes the Tories look nasty and rude.

Finally, all this might have been excused if the poster had been genuinely witty. Then it would have made a positive point - we're funny, light on our feet, and can make and take a joke.

But while Labour's poster was very funny:

I didn't think this was at all.

David Cameron's secret past

On Monday I attended an 80th birthday party for the Conservative Research Department, an anniversary that I appreciate you may have decided to celebrate quietly at home.

David Cameron recalled for his former (and present) colleagues, his time as head of the political section.

He said that he was required to keep tabs on extremist groups. And he did this partly by having left wing newspapers (Militant, Socialist Worker and so forth) delivered to his home under an assumed name.

He wondered whether, if the Tories won the next election, he would be taken aside by the intelligence agencies and asked, strictly confidentially, whether he realised that in his youth he had been living, for some years, with an extremist house mate.

A highlight of the event was a publication of an excellent history of the CRD, worth reading even if you only do it to understand the background of the Cameron inner circle.

To get hold of a copy, send a cheque to the Conservative Research Department, 30 Millbank, SW1P 4DP for £12.50 [ post and packing free] marked for the attention of Lucy Absolom.

Or call 0207 984 8306

Liz Truss and candidate selection

The Liz Truss affair (not Liz Truss's affair but the affair about Liz Truss's affair) raises an important question about local party democracy.

Jonathan Isaby, writing in The Times, correctly described the feelings of frustration that local parties feel at central party intervention in their selection of candidates.

The question is - should this be faced down or appeased?

Two principles clash with each other.

The first is the desperate need to have a Parliamentary party that is of a high quality, diverse and appealing to the electorate.

The Conservative Party locally is not full of ideologues, but nor is it very representative of voters, socially or politically. Each party tries to please itself without thinking of the party nationally. The desire of the centre to influence selection is understandable.

The other principle is local control by voluntary bodies. This is a central principle for David Cameron.

How can these principles be reconciled?

I think the national party plays a critical role both in filtering candidates and in encouraging local parties to select those they think would be valuable to the party nationally, to make it, for instance, more representative.

The party leadership should be resolute in insisting that this interference is reasonable. The 150 people turning up to some meeting in Norfolk are not the only Conservatives with a legitimate interest in the choice of a candidate.

Nor are they the only voters in Norfolk with a legitimate interest.

So the second thing the national party should be doing is promoting all postal ballot selections for local parties. This is such a basic democratic requirement that there is an argument for publicly financing such contests.

Cameron the Owenite

Want to understand Cameron’s new policy on Europe? Why not buy yourself a copy of this.

Should Conservatives be in favour of pre-legislative referendums?

David Davis's article this morning is forceful. But it needs to be understood alongside his earlier decision to quit Parliament and force a by-election over 42 days.

Both reflect his impatience with parliamentary democracy and his instinctive sympathy for populism. It is one of the things that makes him an interesting politician - his populism and his robust civil libertarianism make strange bedfellows.

What he is proposing this morning is, however, a constitutional innovation at least as serious as anything in the Lisbon treaty. And Tories ought to pause as they contemplate it.

David is suggesting that MPs should be bound by plebiscites, and not merely by their electoral mandate, when conducting negotiations with foreign powers.

This is quite different from expanding the use of referendums to approve or vote down reforms of a major kind that have been considered by Parliament. 

I am not at all comfortable with this pre-legislative referendum idea. In fact, before it is introduced, I think this major constitutional change should be put to the people in a referendum.