Education reforms

I had lunch with a number of our researchers from City Hall and the main topic of conversation was the education reforms in the Queen's speech.

As the Mayor's Youth Ambassador I saw the results of educational under-achievement many times and listened to the frustration of parents who felt trapped in an educational system that failed many of their children. There are lots of great schools in London in both the public and private sectors but lots isn't enough.

Everyone agrees that improving quality is important but the real question is how? I have long believed that while there is a shortage of school places there can be no real parental choice and without choice there will be little chance of driving up standards.

Currently the options open to a parent whose child is in an under performing school are all individually focused. They can pay for their child's education by going private, they can move to the catchment area of a better school or they can pay for extra tuition. All these options are closed to parents of lower incomes and none really benefit the other children in the school.

Under Michael's plans a parent can organise local support to start their own school or create the demand for a charity or company to set up a school in their area. This will not only benefit their child but also the other children in the area.

I am yet to find an example of greater choice leading to a poorer product or poorer service. Almost everyone has a huge choice of consumer products from mobile phones to types of milk, why do some people still believe that they should be denied choice in something as important as the education of their children?

Labour's Mayoral cadidate selection more interesting than leadership race

Maybe it's a bit of London parochialism or maybe it's because the Mayoral election will be a number of years before the next General Election (hopefully) but I find myself much more interested in who will be Labour's Mayoral candidate than who will be their party leader.

Livingstone has made it clear that he wants to have another crack at the job. He has also spent the last two years building some pretty big barriers to entry for anyone else, he is still a regular attender at MQTs, has held a number of "Progressive London" events and has written about London issues in the media. Whoever else puts themselves forward will need to be able to counter this relentless London focus.

Alan Johnson's name has been floating around as a possible candidate, an option looking a little more likely since he chose not to stand for Labour leadership himself. He would be a fairly credible candidate except that he has been an MP for Hull West. "I so love London I represent Hull" isn't a great tag line.

Peter Mandleson has been floated as a possibility. Ha,ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!!!! Ohhhh please let it be him, please.

More seriously the names of Oona King and Diane Abbot have recently entered the fray. Both have strong London credentials, both are clever and well regarded, both are widely known by non-political anoraks and both are good with the media.

If the two I think that King had/has the reputation (possible unfairly) of putting party before anything else and in London that could be a disadvantage. Abbot has never been afraid to criticise Labour when she felt it was necessary. London voters like that.

I'm keeping my eyes on this competition, it could be much more influential to the long term recovery or otherwise, of Labour than their leadership race.

Goodbye Government Office For London, you're no longer needed

Hands up who knew anything about the Government Office for London (GOL).

When Labour set up the London Mayoralty they clearly wanted it to be little more than a delivery arm of Westminster politics. That was why Frank Dobson was the official Labour candidate and why the Government Office for London wasn't abolished.

To give him his due Ken Livingstone didn't conform to that model and neither has Boris, yet GOL continued and maintained the strange mix of functions and accountability, duplicating the Mayor's work in some areas, and completely unaccountable to Londoners. All this wasted effort cost the country over £15million a year.

The Conservatives have long called for GOL to be abolished and its functions either absorbed into other government departments or devolved to the Mayor. Within the first fortnight of the new government that is exactly what has been announced.

Now we need to get rid of the London Regional Select Committee which duplicates the work of the London Assembly.

Wenlock and Mandeville

Visit the mascot's home page

1922 Committee

In councils up and down the country and here at city hall the elected Conservatives all sit together when they have their weekly group meeting. This is the case when members of that group form the executive. In the house of commons the Conservatives did things differently, the members of the executive were excluded from the group meeting.

I have no idea whether there was any practical advantage to this separation but since the vote at 11.00 am today that separation has gone. Not everyone is happy about it, 118 Conservative MPs voted against the inclusion of the Front Bench team being admitted to the 1922 committee. Clearly I wasn't there but I understand the proposed change was presented with very little notice and almost no debate.

It is clear that David Cameron wants to get these housekeeping issues sorted out quickly so that he can focus on the job of governing the country and sorting out the economy. I can see more advantages of having a single party group meeting in the commons than having a partial group meeting but, just like the 55% rule, he needs to spend a little bit more time taking his friends and colleagues with him.

New bus for London

I can be a cynical old goat at times but......


I actually really like it.

Dan agrees with Dave, I agree with Dan

Dan Hannan (lefties can stop reading now as I'm sure you'll have written your own script from this point onwards) has written an interesting piece about his public image and the way the media treat him.

Dan and Douglas Carswell have written a book called The Plan, which sets out a number of ideas for decentralisation, localism and radican redistribution of political power away from the Executive. It's well worth a read.

The direction that the Government is taking matches that set out in The Plan, perhaps not as fast or a radical as the book's proposals but Governments really move as quickly as anyone would like. Funny then that the BBC just assumed that Dan would be a frothing at the mouth talking head to slate the coalition in general and David Cameron in particular.

David Cameron has made a commitment to driving power back to people and communities rather than institutions and politicians this is something Dan agrees with, I also happen to think that this is not only a good idea but something which has an inevitability about it. Like Disreali did with the extention of the franchise, if it is going to happen anyway you might as well help it along on its way.

The 55% rule

I have had a good read about the 55% rule before putting pen to paper, or two fingers to keyboard, because I wanted to know what I was talking about before commenting.

There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this proposal, some of it genuine, some of it malicious and partisan. Labour ex-ministers have a vested interest in painting the Government's (still feels funny writing that word in relation to us) plans as a stitch up.

We first need to understand that a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister and the dissolution of parliament are different things. Up until now one always led to another but the game has now changed because of the coalition.

This is the important bit. A vote of no confidence in the PM still only needs 50% +1 vote to be successful, just like before. If that happens the PM has to stand down. If parliament (not the PM or government but parliament as a body) wants to dissolve parliament it needs a 55% agreement, this stops a PM who has say 52% of the MPs whipping a no confidence vote to short-cut the fixed term parliament system, like in Germany.

Losing a no confidence vote will bring down the government but not end the parliament, it will give someone else the opportunity to form a coalition government with a different set of parties. If no-one can form a government the House as a whole will vote to dissolve, go to the country and have an election.

It all makes sense to me, the only point that is unclear is why 55% rather than a 2/3 majority?

The big lesson that I take from this is that the David Cameron is going to have to be clear when explaining what it is he plans to do. The 55% plan makes sense when you look at it but they failure to explain it properly before hand has created an almost instant backlash the could and should have been avoided.

King's Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery

Last night I was a guest of the Royal Navy at the Windsor Castle Military Tattoo, one of the great perks of my job.

To be fair, it is hard for the Navy and RAF to really show off what they do at an event like this, the Thames is too shallow and narrow at that point to bring a ship up and helicopters ad jet aircraft don't have enough space to land. For these reasons the army tends to steal the show a little.

This was the case last. I am biased, being a Gunner myself, but the highlight of last night was the musical ride of the King's Troop, the Royal Horse Artillery.



Please be aware those guns weigh over a tonne each and have no brakes, many of the maneuvers are done at the gallop and the troops themselves are trained fighting soldiers an addition to their ceremonial role.

I don't get it

There are a number of Lib Dems tearing up their membership cards because of the coalition agreement with the Conservatives.

What did they expect?

Their party has been pushing for PR for decades so they should have been ready for coalition government, surely even the most optimistic Lib Dem didn't expect to win with an outright majority. If they believed that the only coalition that they could support would be with Labour why join the Lib Dems?

Strong words have been spoken on both sides of this new set up and I don't expect that Tories and Lib Dems will be at each other's BBQs at any time soon. But any Lib Dem that isn't prepared to be anything other than a spare fuel tank for the Labour party probably wasn't ever really a Lib Dem.

Looks like I was wrong and I'm pleased I was

Yesterday I said that I didn't think that there was a deal to be done with the Lib Dems. Later that day David Cameron announced a deal with Nick Clegg, there isn't really anyway for me to spin this. I got it completely wrong.

I thought that the Lib Dem grass roots wouldn't wear a coalition with us but it seems that they did. Even my old sparing partner Duncan Borrowman could see the bright side, having been as sceptical about the deal as I was.

I wasn't too happy with the secret negotiations that the Lib Dems had with Labour or the number of concessions that we made in the last day, I thought that having been spurned by Labour we could have held out for a better deal.

The bottom line is that our offer was generous, very generous. That said, I was surprised that the Lib Dems didn't keep a bolt hole open, they have made their position clear and seem to be willing to work at making the coalition sustainable over the full five year term.

Looking at the list of Lib Dems with cabinet posts I am not filled with dread and David Cameron has given the right jobs to the Lib Dem team and balanced them with Conservative MPs that the wider party know and trust. The policy list is one that most Conservatives will be fairly happy with, because while we have lost a few cherished policies we have protected the core ones and the Lib Dems have sacrificed a number of their sacred cows too.

I'm still not sure that this coalition will be good for the Lib Dems electorally in the long term but that is their problem not ours, they came into this relationship with their eyes open.

I hoped that I was wrong about a deal being done and that if I was I would be happy. I was, I am.

Congratulations to David Cameron

The great news of tonight is that David Cameron is the new Prime Minister of the UK.

I was at Whitehall this afternoon and was witness to the whole series of events as they unfolded there was a fantastic atmosphere.

We should walk away from these negotiations now

There is a workable and generous offer on the table and I don’t think that we can realistically go any further. The simple truth is that the Lib Dems are well to the left of Labour, except for a small group of "Orange Bookers" in Clegg’s leadership team. The other levels of their party will not be happy with a Conservative coalition at any price.

The secret negotiations with Labour completely contradicted Nick Clegg’s assertion that the party with the largest number of seats/votes deserved the support of the Lib Dems and showed that his promises cannot be taken at face value.

I will lay my cards on the table, the actions of the Lib Dems in the last few days disgusts me.

We have troops serving in Afghanistan but their equipment, welfare, support or even repatriation are not Lib Dem deal-breakers. We have the largest deficit in the country’s history but taxation policy, spending plans or areas for ring-fencing are not deal-breakers. We have an education system which is failing millions of young people yet charter schools, pupil premiums, academies, top up fees or exam standards are not deal-breakers.

No! The deal breaker is the Lib Dems’ desire to change the voting system to one that favours them. Huge issues need to be addressed in the country but Lib Dems, who were largely rejected at the ballot box, are obsessed with a narrow partisan point. As this uncertainty adds to our Britain's economic woes the Lib Dems are looking out for themselves.

The joke of it is that PR would kill the Lib Dems as a party. Their literature from the last election, or indeed any election, and you will see that their main selling point is that they are not one of the big two. “Only the Lib Dems can beat Labour here” or “beat the Conservatives here” is their battle cry, they act like Tory-lite in Conservative areas and Socialist-lite in Labour areas, this tactic will be lost to them as soon as they prop up one of the other parties as the will have to do in the perpetually hung parliaments that they desire.

The Lib Dem fallacy is that people will vote under a PR system in the same way that they currently do, the evidence proves otherwise. In the London Assembly elections and in the EU elections (both under PR) the Lib Dems do worse than they do at the General Election or council elections both of which are First Past the Post.

I don’t think that there is a deal to be done with the Lib Dems, I would love to be wrong but I fear I am not. I believe they will jump into bed with Labour and the Nationalists, who will demand no spending cuts in Wales and Scotland as their price. England (where the Conservatives have a significant majority of seats) will bear the brunt of the public spending cuts and tax increases that will inevitably come. Labour and the Lib Dems will destroy themselves politically for a generation if they form a coalition and I worry that they will also split the Union and destroy the country economically in the process.

For all our sakes I hope that I am wrong.

My goodbye haiku for Gordon Brown

In what has now become an online tradition (on this blog at least), feast your poetic tastebuds on my haiku for Gordon Brown.

Brown bows out at last

He overstayed his welcome

Seems Clegg forced him out

Please feel free to add yours in the comments.

You're witnessing "tail wagging the dog" politics

PR leads to hung parliaments, horse trading and fringe interests getting undue authority. That is what we are seeing at the moment.

We are in the middle of an economic crisis and a major conflict, we have a society overly dependent on borrowing and on welfare yet what is the so called "deal breaker"? A change to the voting system.

The only party which has a long standing commitment to change the voting system is the Lib Dems and they lost seats at the General Election. The voters spoke and they said that voting reform was not their top priority, yet it has now become centre stage in the negotiations.

This is a classic example of one of the main floors with PR.

Great results in both Bexley and Bromley

While the whole world seems to be focused on the hung parliament negotiations I'd like to turn your attention to the results in Bexley and Bromley.

The great news is that at both the parliamentary and council levels the results were excellent for us. In both Bexley and Bromley the success of the Conservative administrations was recognised by the voters and rewarded with an increase in the number of Conservatives on Bromley council and in Bexley the Conservatives maintained their position holding all but 11 seats.

At the parliamentary level Bob Neill and David Evennett were both returned with increased majorities, James Brokenshire, Jo Johnson and Bob Stewart comfortably won their new seats. Chis Phillips and Colin Bloom had tough fights in Lewisham West & Penge and Erith & Thamesmead respectively but both increased their vote and share of the vote making both seats very winnable at the next election.

How come we're not in the Euro but still have to bail out Greece?

I'm more than a little worried by this report in the Telegraph. While the UK has been distracted by elections and the behind closed door negotiations France and Germany have been doing some behind closed doors deals of their own which has resulted in a bail-out deal for Greece which not everyone is happy with.

I have never thought that joining the Euro was a good idea and felt vindicated by the fact that the Eurozone would now need to throw billions at the Greek economy. I was rather brought down to earth when I read that despite staying out of the Euro we would have to contribute to the Greek bail-out too.

There is nothing that we can do about this because of conditions imposed upon us by the Lisbon Treaty. Remember that one? The one that was forced upon us without a referendum by Labour.

Bearing in mind our own perilous financial status I'm not too keen at throwing possibly billions of pounds that we don't have into the bottomless pit of Greek national debt.

PR isn't better it's just different

There is a lot of passion for Proportional Representation (PR) at the moment, much of it ill informed.

The argument tends to go something like "First Past The Post (FPTP) is an old, unfair system where people don't get the result that they voted for. PR is better because it is fair", there are a number of significant holes in this argument.

Firstly many people talk about PR as if it a voting system, it is not. It is the generic name for a range of voting systems which include three major systems, Party list system in a multi-member constituency, Additional-member system, mixed-member system, Single transferable vote in a multi-member constituency and there are number of variations of system within these including: condorcet methods, Copeland's method, Kemeny–Young method, Nanson's method, Schulze method, Bucklin voting, Coombs' method, Instant-runoff (Alternative Vote), Contingent vote, Borda count, D'Hondt method, Sainte-Laguë method, Hare quota, Droop quota, Imperiali quota, CPO-STV, Schulze STV, etc. etc. I don't pretend to know or understand half of these and I strongly doubt that most British voters do either.

When it comes to fairness it is difficult to define. One idea of "fair" is that does the political distribution of MPs reflect the political distribution of votes? Another is that the actions of the government reflect the manifesto commitments in proportion to its political composition.

I call the first test the "Who I Wanted" (WIW) test and the second the "What They Promised" (WTP) test. FPTP scores lower on the WIW test than PR systems and PR scores lower on the WTP test because minority parties tend to have disproportionate power when coalition talks take place, often known a the "tail wagging the dog". This what happened in the London Assembly when Ken Livingstone relied on the Greens to get his budget through, you might be happy with the Greens getting more power than their votes would dictate but would you be so happy if it were the BNP that held the balance of power? Neither system is completely "fair" they are just unfair in different ways.

There are also some big issues around accountability, many PR systems shift the power over candidate selection away from local parties members and towards party HQs, as they are based on party lists rather than constituency members. If there is a particular MP who you feel is acting bady over expenses, for example, how do you punish that particular individual? If the bulk of a party's MPs were excellent it wouldn't be fair to vote against that party. And what would you do if all parties had one or two bad apples?

With PR systems it is often impossible to punish a government for failing to implement their manifesto, they always have the defence that they didn't have a clear majority to do so, "blame the coalition partners not us" they say, which is usually what voters do. This leads to lots of elections and very few changes of government. Far from "fair".

If FPTP was lined up with all its pros and cons against the various PR systems with their pros and cons I suspect that PFTP would win out. We may well get the chance to see.

2010 General Election Result

Oh what a night. I've had very little sleep over the last 36 hours so my head is still rather mushy, that said I'll try to make sense of what happened last night.

It is clear that there was "national swing" in any meaningful definition of the term. There were seats that parties were expecting to win or to hold which they did not and seats which they were probably surprised to lose.

There were a number of local battles where the campaigning machines of the parties cancelled each other out, Hammersmith, Tooting, Westminster North, Cheltenham, Chippenham etc. These seats were well known as being Conservative target seats and were well defended by the incumbents.

The Conservative result is a good one, not a great one but a good one. The starting point was near our lowest ever level and while I had always hoped for an outright majority I knew that it would be a huge mountain to climb.

We now have a hung parliament which, as you may be aware, I think is a terrible situation. I genuinely don't know how the negotiations and party political positioning will play out but I hope it is resolved soon.

Vote Conservative

I've been out campaigning all day and will be doing the same thing tomorrow so blogging will be light. I'll be updating my twitter account so you can follow me there if you're interested.

Please vote Conservative in the general election and in the local elections if you have them in your area. In local government the Conservatives have shown that you can maintain excellent services without breaking the bank, this has been replicated in City Hall and I'm confident that that experience will prove invaluable in dealing with the country's current economic crisis.

While a hung parliament may sound appealing I have no doubt that it would be disastrous for the country. London’s financial futures exchange will open at 1 a.m. on Friday to allow investors to trade gilts as the election results come in, this has never happened before and it isn't because the prospect of a hung parliament fills the financial markets with confidence.

The New Labour experiment has failed and once again we see a Labour government trying to defend a recession, record unemployment, unsustainable borrowing and an outdated response to a changing international picture.

Clearly I am biased but I believe that a Conservative government with a workable majority would be in the country's best interests and for that reason I urge you to vote Conservative tomorrow.

Labour candidate blast Brown

Candidates attack party leaders all the time, what is less common is for the candidate to attack their own party leader.

The candidate in question is Manish Sood who is the Labour candidate standing against Henry Bellingham in NW Norfolk and I'm not talking about the damning with faint praise type of attack, I mean the all out, both barrels attack that you usually save up for your opponent.

Here are some of the things he said about Brown in the Lynn News (the local paper):

"The role of ministers has gone bureaucratic and the action of ministers has gone downhill – it is corrupt.

"I believe Gordon Brown has been the worst Prime Minister we have had in this country.

"It is a disgrace and he owes an apology to the people and the Queen."

I wonder if you'll hear Gordon Brown saying "I agree with Sood"

Thinking of voting Lib Dem?

What policies are you voting for exactly?

Our contract with you

Lib Dems give up any pretence of truthfulness

I am looking at a Lib Dem leaflet and laughing.

I know their game plan, it's always the same. At this stage in the campaign they put out leaflets saying that "it is too close to call" and that every last vote is needed to keep out..... or to beat...... in your area. This is supported with a helpful graph based on whatever figures are most supportive to the message.

Don't think that these figures need to have any relevance to the election in hand, They are often based on national figures, old election results, numbers of councillors, days in the month, dice rolls etc.

What made me laugh today was that the local Lib Dems in Lewisham East, where the leaflet was delivered clearly don't have any figures which support their "too close to call" narrative. So they've clearly made them up.

The graph that they use, with Labour in the lead, Lib Dems a close second and the Conservatives a very distant third, was based on "Lib Dem poll results" 29.4.2010. They don't even pretend that these are legitimate figures, no sample size, no details of collection method, no details of weighting methodology etc.

This is from the party which demands more honesty in politics.

Just for the record the Lib Dems came third in Lewisham East at the last general election and a distant third (13% of the vote) in the 2008 Assembly elections. I conducted some of my own polling in Lewisham East (face to face questioning conducted on 2.5.2010 unweighted sample size of 2) which gave the Conservatives 100% of the popular vote.

Read into that what you will.