Do minimum wages destroy jobs?

All orthodox, and some unorthodox, economic theory says yes. But that's all very well in theory: what about in practice?

Walter Williams tells us that mandated increases in the American Samoan minimum wage, to bring it up to the continental rate, have resulted in a tuna cannery displacing its activities from American Samoa, where it employed 2,000 people, to Lyons, GA, where the new plant will be highly automated and employ only 200 (src, via).

The reasoning is very simple. If you have to pay American Samoan workers more, then you need to increase their output to justify the wage increase. Mechanisation is a classic way to increase productivity, and it necessarily results in lay-offs, until some other industry picks up the slack. Independently, if Samoan workers are not as good with operating a mechanised canning plant as mainland workers (for example, if the education level is not as good), then moving the plant also becomes more attractive.

A similar comment was made by a potato factory manager in the UK on Evan Davis' programme on immigration (blog), who noted that if all the Eastern Europeans went home, he wouldn't take on more Brits: he would mechanise. The minimum wage means that hard-working Eastern Europeans are worth the money but in his experience, British workers weren't willing or able, or whatever, to produce enough output to justify their wages. So in order to justify the wages of the British workers he would employ, he would make them more productive by mechanising large parts of his operation.

Does the minimum wage destroy jobs? You bet it does. It's not always easy to pin down how or where, because in a market economy state interventions propagate in some curious ways: but the evidence is as clear as the theory.

Breaking the Laws?

David Laws is one of the Cabinet I am particularly impressed by. The Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury is one of the most able in Cabinet, and is firmly committed to a thorough-going, vertebral liberalism. However, he has been caught out claiming expenses for rent on a property which he (probably) shouldn't have done (src): the rules changed in '06 to prevent people from claiming for rent where the property is owned by a spouse, and his landlord was, and is, also his — now, this is where the story gets tricky. To say 'partner' would beg the question of Laws' innocence, since the rules used the term. 'Lover' doesn't do it justice. 'Long-term boyfriend', perhaps: this was a long-term relationship but not one of a united household.

And Laws' sexual orientation was, prior to the Telegraph's story this morning, a secret. So he's in a tricky spot, and was in one when the rules changed, as to cease claiming on the basis of the rules change would have raised awareness of what was going, to move out was presumably an unattractive option, and to keep claiming put him in a dubious position with regard to the rules.

My opinion, as I think must be clear already, is that it would be sad to see Laws go. He is highly competent, with real-world experience and has the right ideas about the role of government. He was placed in something of a tight spot by the change of rules. And the government needs him.

However, my analysis is that it is sadly difficult to see how he can survive. Matthew d'Ancona made the point on Today that the sooner he goes, the sooner he can come back. That's probably correct, and I fear that with the press now aiming for a scalp, he may simply have to go. It is regrettable, and if he survives this I shall certainly be glad for the government, but it is hard to see how that can happen.

Ahem

The cycle of 'exaggeration, distortion, inaccuracy and sensationalism' (pdf) strikes again.

Teenagers' 'mephedrone deaths' not drug related (src)

Can there be a soul who believes that the drugs debate in the UK is sane, measured, balanced and above all, based solidly on facts?

Take a substance which someone with a bee in their bonnet thinks ought to be banned, and take another person who unfortunately died having gone near the substance, and the press can whip up a drugs scare. Not even the BBC is immune. And then we find out that the deaths weren't even related to the substance initially suspected.

So, this drug, which was claimed to be widespread and only had two reported deaths, has not even claimed those lives. (If it was as widespread as the scaremongers wanted us to believe, then its reported death rate started out as negligible and has become zero.) Meanwhile, the mephedrone supply chain has been forced underground and the drug has been made more risky, thus increasing the chance of deaths among users and pushing them into the hands of criminal gangs.

Nice one, guys. Way to make young people safer.

Cameron's tips

After an interview with Evan Davis on this morning's Today programme, the Prime Minister rather gamely agreed to select the Today programme racing tips:

[He] came up with Daring Dream in the 3.50pm at Ayr for those who were a "fan of the coalition". For those who were "slightly more sceptical" about how the coalition would work out he suggested Midnight Fantasy in the 3pm at Wolverhampton.

William Hill later claimed they "had been inundated by punters wanting to back the PM's tips". Spokesman Graham Sharpe said: "We can only hope that the PM is a better politician than tipster or this could cost us hundreds of thousands." (src)

I quite enjoyed that odd little moment of radio. And it's not something you'd think you could get away with with every prime minister, either.

For those of an inquisitive mind-set, Midnight Fantasy finished without placing, and Daring Dream came second (src). If you're keeping score, that puts David Cameron well ahead of the Today programme as a tipster. That is to say, you would actually have made a profit if you had followed his tips each-way. Nevertheless, the government would be better advised to try and earn its revenues from taxing bookmakers than from frequenting them.

Free-for-all education

Jim Naughtie, commenting on the debate around the government's schools policy:

Critics say it is an assault on the state education sector.

So do some of its supporters!

The idea that the man in Whitehall, or even the man in the town hall, knows better than parents and staff on the ground is not simply out-dated, but never-dated. That notion, offensively relegating parents and staff to second-class agents in a game played out by politicians, deserves to be undermined in the most effective way possible. Regime change, installing genuine democratic control by parents rather than the sham democracy of elected bureaucrats, is entirely necessary. If parental power over funding is the goal, then school choice and capitation funding are the correct means.

That's not to say that every aspect seems equally well-thought through. I particularly enjoyed hearing Michael Gove's announcement that all schools will be offered the chance to escape local government bureaucracy by filling in a form. On new providers, he did waffle somewhat on the standards to which those providers would be held. It's still not entirely clear whether private capital will be allowed to fund investment in new schools: in an era of budgetary difficulty, this would surely be a sensible measure.

Nevertheless, the overall tenor and direction is good. And yes, it is an assault, albeit subterranean, on the way things are currently done. But that's a good thing, when parents and teachers have no power and no choice.

Questions to which the answer is 'Years'

Noting the Government's line on the public finances, and their insistence that the cuts are 'Labour's cuts', Mike Smithson at Political Betting asks, How long can they go on blaming Labour? (src)

If there's any justice, the answer will be 'Years'. After all, Labour was still citing 'decades of under-investment by the Tories' as justification for their public spending increases at least as late as 2005, if not even further on. And that, in spite of the fact that the Tories hadn't quite managed a plural number of decades in an unbroken run.

Oh noes, a double-dip recession!

The ONS has revised government borrowing figures downwards yet more, to £156bn (src). That's nearly £19bn below Treasury forecasts. At the risk, therefore, of sounding like a stuck gramophone record, why is the left getting its knickers in a twist about cutting by a comparatively trivial £6bn?

Because if losing £6bn from public spending was going to send the economy into a tailspin, surely losing three times that much is three times as likely to cause the damage. Even by the left's own version of economics, cutting by £6bn cannot be too great a danger.

Somehow, this seems apt

Strephon, the Liberal-Conservative installed by an ill-natured fairy, is wrecking the country with constitutional innovations. Celia and Leila prove that a three-line whip is no match for an influential fairy, and Tolloller and Mountararat give a good running to the case against a reformed Upper House:

Celia. You seem annoyed.

Lord Mountararat. Annoyed! I should think so! Why, this ridiculous protégé of yours is playing the deuce with everything! Tonight is the second reading of his Bill to throw the Peerage open to Competitive Examination!

Lord Tolloller. And he’ll carry it, too!

Lord Mountararat. Carry it? Of course he will! He’s a Parliamentary Pickford – he carries everything!

Leila. Yes. If you please, that’s our fault!

Lord Mountararat. The deuce it is!

Celia. Yes; we influence the members, and compel them to vote just as he wishes them to.

Leila. It’s our system. It shortens the debates.

Lord Tolloller. Well, but think what it all means. I don’t so much mind for myself, but with a House of Peers with no grandfathers worth mentioning, the country must go to the dogs!

Leila. I suppose it must!

Lord Mountararat. I don’t want to say a word against brains – I’ve a great respect for brains – I often wish I had some myself – but with a House of Peers composed exclusively of people of intellect, what’s to become of the House of Commons?

Leila. I never thought of that!

Lord Mountararat. This comes of women interfering in politics. It so happens that if there is an institution in Great Britain which is not susceptible of any improvement at all, it is the House of Peers!

[Iolanthe, Gilbert & Sullivan. (src)]

Bad idea, Dave

Cameron's first actual bad move, as opposed to bad ideas, sounds like it is going to be de-fanging the 1922 Committee (src). Customarily, this Tory internal parliamentary committee has been the outlet for backbench dissent, and when the Tories are in government, the frontbench is specifically barred from voting on its motions.

It sounds like Cameron wants to make the opposition rules apply during government, and get frontbenchers a vote in the committee. A technical change, you might think, and one which gives the leadership less of a headache from their right-wing backwoodsmen. Perhaps some may see it as welcome, in those terms. However, although I do not particularly agree with many of the backbenchers' more strident views and am more in tune with the Tory frontbench on a lot of matters, yet I do believe that it is good for democracy that the backbenchers have a voice. The '22 is that outlet, and the change which is in the offing sounds like a bad move.

On a day when Nick Clegg makes a very welcome speech about empowering the little guys against an overweening centre (src), it is ironic that the Tory parliamentary leadership should be trying to empower its own party's parliamentary centre at the expense of its little guys.

Can I be the only person…

…who, on seeing this picture:Thinks, 'Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Willetts?'

For interested parties, there's a BBC article about the government's science policy here.

Do people marry for tax?

'People don't get married for money,' they say. 'Tax cuts wouldn't motivate people to get married,' they say. 'It's mercenary, and no-one thinks like that,' they say.

The BBC tells us that they're wrong:

Delphine Rorive, a 31-year-old management consultant, "Pacsed" her boyfriend Frederic Morel, 29, in July last year.

"We just wanted to pay less taxes," she says. (src)

It's not that people enter deep relationships for tax reasons, but clearly some people certainly do regularise those relationships for tax reasons. So, back to the drawing board on the whole 'tax cuts don't motivate people to get married' line.

Next week, the BBC will probably accidentally explode the 'correlation, not causation' argument linking marriage and relationship stability.

Living in a Scandinavian socialist paradise?

Not if Andreas Bergh, Swedish economist at Lund, is to be believed. The Swedes' social-democratic paradise is, in reality, a social-democratic, high-tax, low-redistribution body being carried around by a good old-fashioned capitalist engine-chassis combination. Gee, whodathunkit?

Unhappy Hari

Diddums Johann Hari is bringing out one of the lefties' beloved fallacies about the election result: that people who voted for the Lib Dems will be distraught that the Lib Dems are in government (src). Some will: I can think of a few friends who may well be. But as a rule, one cannot tell voters that you know better than they what they voted for. And if they wanted a Labour government, they should have voted for Labour. A vote for the Liberal Democrats propels, at the margins, the Liberal Democrats into government, and this is what has happened.

But do you know, I think we might be getting to him on another matter. Later in his column, he writes,

In this febrile Dave New World, the Labour leadership election matters even more. Cameron and Osborne are committed to turning off the stimulus and cut-cut-cutting now, even though we aren't safely out of recession: check out the history books for 1937 to see what happens next.

Previously, he has condemned policies of cuts as 'Hooverite', which I have already explained is fallacious (src), but Hoover was well out of the Presidency by 1937. Indeed, Roosevelt was fighting his first re-election campaign by then. So, um, when unemployment rose in 1938, was it because of a policy of 'cuts', or because of Roosevelt's activist federal programmes?

More dodgy reasoning on electoral reform

I ought to be absolutely clear: I would be inclined to vote in favour of the principle of the alternative vote. I am not saying that I oppose it. But some of the rhetoric makes me despair.

One of the constant refrains is that the alternative vote system ensures that each MP is supported by a majority of their voting constituents. This is sadly wrong.

It is wrong because it ignores exhausted ballots. This also plays into the claim that you see no 'wasted votes', because exhausted ballots in AV are 'wasted votes' in the sense that the existing system's opponents use the phrase. Suppose all your favoured candidates are knocked out of the race: then your ballot is cast aside, and no longer counts. Instead, you keep going (possibly) until you have only two candidates left, and pile of exhausted ballots which had no vote for either of them. And the winner has the support of more than half the non-exhausted ballots. In other words, MPs elected under AV don't even have the support of 50%+1 of those voting: they have the support of 50%+1 of those whose votes have made it through the multiple rounds of the counting process.

I have no quarrel with that system: I do not believe in restricting voters' choices, which our present system does. But I would never try to defend it on the basis that it guarantees majority support, or that it avoids 'wasted votes'. For it does neither.

Slightly disingenuous

I'm trying to work this one out. The Guardian endorsed the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems were looking, for a while at least, as if they could be entering government with the Tories. (Still, possible, by the way, although it's more likely to be a minority Tory administration. I think I'd prefer a coalition, but one has to be realistic.) So why is the Guardian trying to wreck the negotiations with leaked documents? Why are they behaving as though the sky is falling in?

Because if you support the Lib Dems, then you support them, right? You support their judgment call on whom to support in government. You support the idea that they could have an influence over the legislative agenda. And a paper which is committed to an electoral system which generates coalition governments should surely realise that it makes little sense to support a party and then complain when they enter government with a party you didn't support: that is what happens when you have coalitions.

Unless, of course, the Guardian's endorsement of the Liberal Democrats wasn't really a proper endorsement. If what they wanted was a non-Labour anti-Tory endorsement, and the Lib Dems were the obvious choice. They didn't support the Lib Dems, they just opposed them less than anyone else. And then wrote up that lack of opposition as a conversion to the yellow team. But surely, not even the Guardian would be that disingenuous?

Election bias

John Mann, Labour, has just told the BBC that when he was canvassing on the doorstep, he didn't hear people talking about the need for cuts in government spending. This is John Mann, MP for the safe seat of Bassetlaw in north Nottinghamshire. Most of his constituents voted for him.

This morning, Liam Fox, Conservative, told the media that when he was canvassing on the doorstep, people weren't talking to him about voting reform. This Liam Fox, MP for North Somerset, where almost half his constituents voted for him.

Spot anything in common? Yep: you can't rely on an elected MP's doorstep experience. He, or she, was returned, so of course his constituents are going in large part to agree with him and not to raise issues with which he disagrees. You ask candidates who weren't returned, and you'll get a different answer. They probably heard people talking about all sorts of things they'd sooner not discuss, or where they disagreed with the potential constituent.

So when you hear an elected MP tell the media that they never heard constituents raise such-and-such an issue, remember: they're unlikely to. They were elected.

The best of all possible outcomes?

Charlotte Gore has a brilliant post about the prospect of some kind of a Lib-Con deal (link). Read it.

She raises a very interesting point about tribalism. Plainly, tribal and highly-partisan Labour supporters are going to be disappointed at the outcome of the election. Not as disappointed as they could be, granted, but nevertheless it is by no means a good outcome for Labour and the prospects of Labour's principal parliamentary opponents in some kind of deal must be a worry. For tribal Tories and Liberal Democrats, though, the prospect of having to do some kind of deal with each other is also dismaying. No partisan observer is going to be encouraged.

But those of us who are non-partisan and non-tribal, especially civil libertarian bloggers and newspaper columnists, will be very encouraged at co-operation between the two parties with strongly-expressed views on the last thirteen years' erosions of freedom. Add to that the fact that the Liberal Democrats' pro-market wing is currently in the ascendancy, and you can see that co-operation between the Liberal Democrats and the Tories is possible and desirable.

There is one thing I should like to add to Charlotte's analysis: from the point of view of a non-partisan observer, this could be the best outcome from this election. At least, it is for anyone not of a strongly left-wing non-partisan persuasion. Allow me to explain.

Many of Labour's most egregious dreadfulnesses stemmed from the fact that the leadership was winning landslides and felt it could get away with almost anything. A landslide victory would have empowered Tory High Command at the expense of their backbenches: not a good omen.

But equally, a very tight win would have empowered the backbenches relative to the leadership. If you can't remember what it was like last time the Tory backbenches were causing chaos, you'll be needing to ask your parents about 'Maastricht'.

So, given that getting Labour out of Number Ten is a priority, the best result is a hung parliament with the Tories forming the largest party. But we have, as I indicated yesterday, something even better than that, because Labour cannot form a government with the Lib Dems' support alone: they need a coalition of about four party groupings, which would be a waking nightmare for any Prime Minister, and doubly so for a control freak like Brown.

The Tories are in a strong position to obtain confidence and supply, and if necessary they can negotiate on legislative business as they go along. A coalition would probably be better for various reasons, but I am quite hopeful that the outcome of the negotiations will prove to be, you may say, satisfactory.

What deal should they do?

The prediction for the election results (BBC) is that the Tories will form the largest party in a hung parliament, with Labour and the Lib Dems unable to form a majority between them. So Labour, if it is to produce any sort of majority, will need to get a shedload of minor parties involved. The Welsh and Scottish nationalists may play ball, and Caroline Lucas potentially, but even that might not be sufficient. Basically, Labour is in the position of needing to herd rather a lot of cats to avoid losing a confidence motion.

By contrast, the Tories are likely to need only one thing: a promise by the Liberal Democrats to abstain on any confidence motion. Realistically, that gives the Tories a strong negotiating position. Obtaining Liberal Democrat support would be overkill by about seventy votes, but abstention cuts the Lib Dems' effective parliamentary power in half, and probably more than halves the price of any deal. The Tory majority in a parliament with abstaining Lib Dems is projected to be eight: far more sensible for a vote which only needs to be squeaked.

Negotiating for abstention sounds like an odd strategy. Perhaps odd enough that it won't work. But if I were in the Tory leadership (ha!) that is the deal which I would be pressing. A public agreement between Cameron and Clegg, with Clegg promising a three-line abstention (he's done that before) on all confidence votes for the duration of the parliament, in exchange for whatever price the Lib Dems end up extracting.

I should apologise for any errors. As you might understand, I didn't sleep for an awfully long time last night.

Mathematics and electoral reform

It's polling day, and the likelihood is that electoral reform will be discussed up and down the country. For those who don't know, my day job is in the world of academic mathematics, and believe it or not, it has something to say in this national debate.

I can understand that some people might be puzzled by this: mathematics is a Platonic world of pure facts and unadulterated truth, while politics is often an argument over subjective matters like values, and sometimes a downright grubby affair in which truth is the first casualty. Can these two worlds collide?

But they can. We mathematicians have a nasty habit of being able to turn literally everything into mathematics. Now, by that I do not mean that everything is numbers, although lots is. But everything is susceptible to a mathematician's thought process: reducing a problem to its core elements, working logically with those core elements and producing a result which is logically consistent with everything which had gone before.

And electoral reform is one such area. There are two famous theorems in electoral reform which show that a lot of the rhetoric is mere puff: Arrow's impossibility theorem (wiki), and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem (wiki).

The first, Arrow's theorem, proved that the following three properties of voting systems are incompatible:

• If every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers X over Y.
• If every voter's preferences between X and Y remain unchanged when Z is added to the slate, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged.
• There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to determine the group's preference. (src)

They are all desirable properties, but no voting system can have all three. So don't let anyone tell you that we will get rid of all our problems by changing the voting system. Some, yes. Many, perhaps. But all, no.

The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, meanwhile, proved that for a 'non-dictatorial system' (in the Arrow sense, above) the only way that every candidate can have a possibility of winning is if voters are able to vote tactically. In other words, since STV is a sane system, it cannot eliminate the possibility of tactical voting. Given that this is a major selling point of the Lib Dems' for their preferred reform, I think we deserve to hear the names Gibbard and Satterthwaite a little more, don't you?

For, leaving behind mathematics and entering politics proper, the only defence against the charge is for the proponents to acknowledge their opponents' strongest card: the STV system is so complicated that voters can't work out how to connect their ballot with a returned MP. STV has very few other problems, in comparison with other systems and noting that Arrow tells us no system is perfect; but the electorate will, as a rule, be unable to understand how it works.

And at that point, politics proper enters the fray: do you value a system which is 'fair' over one which people understand, or a system people understand over one which is 'fair'?

This double-dip nonsense

A quickie, this. Labour keep saying that the Tories' proposals to cut public spending by £6bn would put the economy in danger of a double-dip recession. They base this claim on the idea that government spending is all that the economy has to keep it going, so anything you do to cut government spending is a Bad Thing [1]. Curious, that.

But it's even more curious when you consider that the government's own deficit projections came in £12bn lower than forecast. So if the Tories' proposals to cut the deficit by a modest £6bn put us in danger of a double-dip recession, then how much more should Labour's failure to run the full deficit of £175bn!

I don't deny that people have concerns about the Tories. Some of them I even share, in spite of their having my vote. But this stuff from Labour about a double-dip recession is total nonsense.

[1] This illustrates one reason why I'm not a Keynesian: their recessionary policies don't add up. On the Keynesian view, government waste is to be celebrated as good for the economy. Bonkers.

Gordon Brown, friend to the private sector

Gordon Brown, on being asked what he will do if Labour loses the election:

He wants to do “something for charity, voluntary work. I don’t want to do business or anything — I just want to do something good.” (src)

As a commenter at the bottom of the page noted, this is straight down the line: business and 'doing good' are incompatible. It's only 'good' if you don't charge for it.

So if you run a shop selling food to people, that's not good, that's just business. If you teach private tuition students, that's not good, it's just business. If you — unlikely though this is in the UK — work in a factory making consumer gadgets so that people can be entertained and informed, that's not good, it's just business.

Architect? Business.
Accountant? Business.
Courier? Business.
Ice cream stall in the Sahara? Business.

Providing for any sort of consumer demand? It's not good, it's just business. Despite the fact that the country would grind to a halt if all the private sector workers downed tools tomorrow.

Of course there is a need for the charitable and public sectors. I'm a public sector worker! But to dismiss business with a wave of the hand and to assert that people in the profit-seeking sector of the economy are not doing good is totally and utterly wrong-headed. Doctors, nurses, and charitable workers earn a salary but we say that they are doing good nonetheless. So too, owners and workers in the private sector make money from providing the goods and services which people desire and demand. This, too, is good.

We need a government which recognises that doing good is not the sole preserve of the charitable and public sectors. Plainly, that is not this Labour government.

Situational politics

Having declared myself in terms of my own constituency, a mixture of push and pull factors which regular readers will have seen me grapple with over recent months, and while I would prefer the party of my vote to form a government — I think I might slightly favour a minority administration, although I to wax and wane on that question — I have discovered one constituency in which I can honestly say there is a better alternative to the Tory candidate.

Sutton and Cheam is host to Philippa Stroud, who is a founding member of a church which ascribes substance abuse, minority sexualities and mental illness to demonic influences (src). Now, I know that people are entitled to their views, and as a Christian it would be foolish of me to try and deny that the supernatural exists and can have an influence on people's lives. However, it is highly simplistic to associate all such phenomena with demonic activity, and should certainly not be the first port of pastoral call for anyone who is counselling someone dealing with such issues. Substance abuse and mental illness are most often purely medical, and sexual temptation of whatever sort is generally temptation-as-is-common-to-man(-and-woman).

To slip into some jargon, trying to discern supernatural methods behind secondarily-caused phenomena is a mug's game, albeit a mug's game which too many evangelical Christians are willing to engage in. In the church, we have to make it plain that you cannot find demons lurking under every problem, and I would be unhappy at the idea of someone with those rather un-nuanced views taking office in a church, let alone becoming an MP. Philippa Stroud I cannot support.

But Sutton and Cheam has another party, a far smaller party standing in it, for which I have a little sneaking affection. They are more extreme than me — to borrow my railway metaphor, they appear to be heading non-stop through my station and the next half-dozen — but their direction is not too bad either. Martin Cullip is standing for the Libertarians, and in Sutton and Cheam, I suspect he would have my vote.

Vaulting ambition

Afua Hirsch is rightly alarmed at the government's attempts to overturn a defendant's right to hear the allegations against them and to respond to those allegations. She writes,

How audacious! The government tries to overturn principles of law dating back to 13th century.

It is fundamental to a civil trial that defendants have the ability to hear the allegations against them and respond. This the government was seeking to deny. (src)

I wrote about this issue nearly two years ago, would you believe, in the context then of criminal trials not civil ones: link. I should add that Jack Straw has managed to do enough in the intervening period to alter radically my opinion of him.

Knowing the charges and the evidence is the basis of all fair legal systems. People being tried should know what the charges are, should be able to review all the evidence which will be presented, and should be able to contest the allegations. Otherwise, how is a defendant to do that which defines their relationship to the court: to defend themselves?

Lord Neuberger didn't go nearly far enough when he wrote,

The principle that a litigant should be able to see and hear all the evidence which is seen and heard by a court determining his case is so fundamental, so embedded in the common law, that, in the absence of parliamentary authority, no judge should override it … [it] represents an irreducible minimum requirement of an ordinary civil trial.

Because as you will have seen if you looked at my previous post, then the case was that the government was attempting to enshrine anonymised evidence in law, using parliamentary authority. And such a bill was passed, nem con. All of the last Parliament has been complicit in this one.

But Hirsch has underestimated the regression of this government. For in the first century AD, a Roman governor was recorded as commenting,

it [is] not the custom of the Romans to give up anyone before the accused met the accusers face to face and had opportunity to make his defence concerning the charge laid against him. (src)

And indeed, even in the Bronze Age, the Israelites had worked out that testing witness evidence was a good idea if you want people to be tried fairly. The government's attempts don't wind the clock back to the thirteenth century: they are far more ambitious than that. On matters of legal fairness, they want to send us all the way back into prehistory.

Better that they took a trip to prehistory than the rest of us, thankyouverymuch.

Mirror, Mirror, off the wall

I've just had a look at the Daily Mirror's 'tactical voting guide' which they have published to try to stop the Tories gaining a majority (pdf). (It's interesting, by the way, that it's always anti-Tory tactics: why never anti-Labour?) I have to report that I think it's probably going to be similar to those maps the Americans were using when they were bombing Sarajevo during the Kosovo conflict. You remember: the Chinese embassy got hit 'because of an out-of-date map'.

Let us leave the vagaries of American targetting, though, and turn to the Mirror's attempt. The reason I suspect it will not do so well is simple: they have missed an ultra-tight marginal race between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats happening here on my doorstep. As a new creation, there is no incumbent or a previous result, but the best available notional result is a Lib Dem majority of a mere two hundred and three. This is more marginal than any of the listed Lib Dem seats except Guildford (89) and Solihull (124).

Surely we should be on the Mirror's little list of society offenders who surely won't be missed. But missing we are.

The other reason I have for suspecting that this is not an entirely honest attempt, apart from the missing Lib Dem-Tory marginals, is that of the Mirror's seventy-one battlegrounds, they advise voting for Labour in fifty of them, Lib Dem in twenty, and Speaker in the last. In other words, the Mirror's 'anti-Tory alliance' is really a cover for a last-ditch attempt to shore up Labour support in seats which are beginning to look very ropey.

Which is also the conclusion I came to listening to Peter Hain trying not to advise Labour supporters to vote for Lib Dems on the Today programme. His valiant effort only failed to fall flat on its face because Jim Naughtie didn't put the logic of his position to him: 'Mr. Hain, you are telling Liberal Democrats to vote for Labour in some seats, but you are refusing to call on Labour supporters to vote for Lib Dems in certain others. It sounds to me like you are unequivocally calling for people to vote for Labour, and we would expect that of a Labour politician. So why are we meant to be surprised at all of this?'

A pressing endorsement

Normally, I don't view press endorsements as terribly important, but it is noteworthy that only the Mirror is now supporting Labour. The Independent, widely expected to have called for a hung parliament, is doing the next best thing by urging its readers to vote Liberal Democrat, and the Guardian — always having been thought of as firmly in the Labour camp, albeit not as tribally as the Mirror — has spectacularly done the same. The rest of the major papers are, unsurprisingly, supporting the Conservatives.

However, the endorsement I really want to mention is the Economist's. It has declared for the Conservatives (src), and has done so with the kind of broad approach I take. It cannot summon up a very great enthusiasm for the Tories: in truth, neither can I.

Like the Economist, I see a party which is by no means perfect. Nevertheless, it is led by a group of people committed to public service reform and has been moving in broadly the correct direction, with the occasional slip. It is not the case that in every area of political influence, the Tories are proposing a shift towards a more liberal Britain, but on the issues which are likely to define the next few years — public services and the economy chief among them — they want to move us towards greater involvement, greater responsibility, and greater freedom.

They understand, like the better angels of New Labour before them, that sensible interventions work with the grain of human nature, not against it. They see that the public can provide solutions to public problems, and that providing incentives is more effective than rigidly regulating everything. That may not get us as far as I should like, but it keeps us moving in the right direction, and turns away from most of the errors of the recent past.

I can recall some years ago, when there was major disruption on the railway network, having to get from York where I had been on a visit, back home to Leicester. Trains were cancelled left, right and centre, and there was basically no way of me making what was usually a very straightforward journey on a direct train. I couldn't get to my destination by a direct route, so I started taking trains which were headed in the right direction. I got home many hours later, but I got there.

The Tories aren't flagging up my destination on their schedule. They're not exactly aimed straight at where I would like us to go. They certainly wouldn't go far enough. But since this is the train headed in most nearly the right direction, I shall take it.