David Cameron

What Do The Tories Stand For?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Interchangeable
Interchangeable

 

Iain Martin poses an excellent question to restive Conservative ministers and backbenchers currently jostling for position in a 2015 conservative leadership election that may very well never transpire – what would they do for the country if they actually got the job?

A very pertinent question. Watching the unseemly attempts of cabinet member after cabinet member manoeuvre for advantage and brief against perceived rivals provokes unpleasant flashbacks to the time when Gordon Brown finally had his way and muscled Tony Blair out of Number 10 Downing Street, only to become prime minister and realise that he had just fulfilled the extent of his ambition.

With more than a year to go until what will undoubtedly be a closely-fought election campaign, now is really not an appropriate time for self-interested ministers to be promoting their personal prospects at the expense of stable governance. And if they absolutely must indulge in such counterproductive, selfish shenanigans, they could at least give the public some semblance of a reason to believe that they offer a better alternative to David Cameron.

As Iain Martin points out, none of the would-be plotters have yet risen to this challenge:

Some people are positioning ahead of a potential vacancy and talking seriously in private about who the next Tory leader will be. So far it has all been very heavy on personalities and score-settling.

What we hear less of is ideas. What do those who want to succeed Cameron, if he loses, want to do with or for the country? This is, I know, a hopelessly naive question, although I never tire of asking it during a leadership race.

We already have a coalition government that stands for next to nothing. Blaming Labour for the country’s economic predicament and the state of the public finances may be correct, but it doesn’t amount to a platform for governing. And with little more than a year left in the lifetime of this parliament, we can expect precious little more in terms of radical or effective new policies. This mean that the electorate has to make up their minds based on what we can see today. So what is there?

Michael Gove’s education reforms spring to mind as something both tangible and in line with conservative principles, but aside from that, what else can the Tories point to? The period from 2010, when the United Kingdom finally escaped the Gordon Brown terror, has been characterised by retrenchment and burden-sharing and sacrifice-making and painful compromise at every turn. There has been almost nothing positive. Whether it is fiscal policy, defence policy, welfare reform (though credit to Iain Duncan Smith for at least trying), privacy or constitutional reform, it has been an exercise in damage limitation on all fronts.

If the conservatives were (heaven forfend) to elect Boris Johnson as their new leader, or Theresa May, or George Osborne or anyone else, what would they do differently? Why go through the trauma of ditching Cameron and choosing someone else who may be identical, or worse?

Iain Martin proposes a good set of questions, well worth asking, that could help distinguish one candidate from another and maybe tease out some real talent or independent thinking amidst a sea of caution and homogeneity. Making the valid point that voters will not warm to a new leader who only attained his or her position by virtue of being ‘next in line’, he issues the following challenge:

Eventually, the rest of us in the audience – taxpayers, the people who live here, Tories and non-Tories alike – might like to hear what applicants to be Conservative leader and trainee prime minister have in mind, other than stopping each other.

Here are his ten questions:

1) How can the country be more productive?

2) How can we maximise the advantages of globalisation without having to concrete over the whole of southern England to accommodate the millions more who want to be here?

3) Are our banks still too big and how do we get more competition to aid consumers and business?

4) Why is the tax system such a mess of conflicting incentives?

5) Is EU membership really compatible with being a self-governing nation state?

6) Is it even possible to be truly self-governing any longer in the age of the EU, big tech and giant corporates that operate across continents?

7) The Blair/Gove education reforms are up and running – how might they be built on?

8) What is the UK’s foreign policy?

9) What are the threats and how will we defend ourselves?

10) Can the UK be remade to give all its constituent parts, especially England, greater autonomy while still holding together the Union?

While it is absolutely right to challenge those seeking to be David Cameron’s successor to answer these questions, in reality it would be good for all politicians and party leaders to have a stab at addressing them, because these ten questions really form the basis of how we currently see ourselves as a country, and where we want to go from here.

Take the first question on productivity. This could lead to an interesting debate along any number of lines, including trade union reform, European Union membership status, working conditions for interns and apprentices, and more. Already we would see a divide between the mainstream Conservative party MPs who remain deeply eurosceptical, and the more Europhile fringe. Similarly, a contrast would be drawn between the mainstream anti-union position and those such as Robert Halfon MP who have been trying to reintroduce a trade union heritage to the party.

The tax system question is also one that urgently requires answering, not just to help search for the ideal future Tory leader but because the current tax code is such a mess. Some are quite keen to continue incentivising certain ‘good’ behaviours such as marriage through the tax code while others (one dares to hope) might argue for a radical stripping down and simplification of the system. While none of the potential candidates are likely to come out in support of a genuinely interesting idea such as a flat tax, we might see ideas about eliminating the myriad of tax credits in order to lower rates for everyone gain some traction.

Martin’s list is not perfect, and some of the questions are more philosophical than immediately useful. The brace of questions on the EU, for example, are the type of topic that one could imagine being debated at length over canapes at Davos or Bilderberg, but which are of no help in distinguishing future Tory leadership candidates. EU membership is clearly increasingly incompatible with being a self-governing nation state, and will remain that way for as long as the Treaty of Rome’s ‘ever closer union’ call continues to be advanced with no democratic mandate from the European people. And no Tory leader is ever likely to publicly surrender British policymaking to the forces of the EU, multinational business or big tech, no matter what compromises may take place in secret.

The questions on foreign policy and preparing to meet future threats are of extreme importance. While Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continued slide back toward authoritarian despotism is not about to herald a new age of big set-piece land wars in Europe, it will at least hopefully remind UK policymakers that the next unknown threat to the UK will by definition come from out of the blue. Having been chastened by that reminder, Tory leadership candidates might have some refreshing opinions on the size, strength and scope of our armed forces, perhaps with a view toward undoing some of the recent damage done.

The final question on remaking the UK to allow greater (and ideally equal) autonomy for all constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and the need to clearly set out those powers that belong at Westminster, those that belong with the home nations and those that should be devolved to local level is perhaps the most important of all. This blog has long advocated for answering this question by holding a UK constitutional convention to decide these matters once and for all. While this is an extremely unlikely prospect, it would be interesting to know the potential candidates’ thoughts on these matters.

But of course we will hear no opinions on any of these matters, because there are no Tory leadership candidates. And there are no Tory leadership candidates because there is no Tory leadership election on the cards.

The bottom line is this – there are a lot of important questions about the current state of our country and how best to move forward. Iain Martin has done a good service by listing some of these, and any politician who can disengage from the daily grind of politicking and governance for long enough to answer them would be making a valuable contribution to the debate.

But those Conservative ministers and prominent backbenchers inclined to look past the 2015 general election to burnish their leadership prospects while refusing to engage in real debate on the issues are just being opportunistic and cowardly, and do not deserve the air time or our attention.

Those who want to replace David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party ought to try believing in and standing for something themselves – something other than their own selfish career advancement – before the jostling for position and knife-sharpening gets out of hand.

Bold Proposals On Tax, Ignored By Cameron

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

taxcuts

 

As more people come out in support of scrapping the 40% tax band – or doing something, anything that might alleviate the pinch on middle income earners – David Cameron remains resolutely set against the idea.

This time, it was the turn of one of Cameron’s own No. 10 Policy Board members, Nadhim Zahawi, to advocate for 800,000 people caught up in the fiscal drag which has seen them start paying the 40% rate on their marginal income in the last three years.

The Telegraph reports:

Mr Zahawi on Wednesday praised plans by Renewal, a Tory pressure group, to abolish the 40p rate entirely and deliver a tax cut worth £2,000-a-year for 2 million middle class workers. 

Under the proposals, the move would be funded by lowering threshold for the 45p rate from £150,000 to £62,000. 

In a speech at Policy Exchange, a think-tank with links to the Conservative Party, Mr Zahawi said: “It is a welcome development that Conservatives have started to seriously debate where next for income tax. 

“Labour have the 50p, the Lib Dems have the mansion tax, we need our own iconic tax policy. I think Dave Skelton’s [from Renewal’s] contribution, and his suggestion that we abolish the 40p rate and pay for it by lowering the 45p rate was a great way of starting the conversation.”

Renewal’s plan is not perfect – £62,000 seems far too low to impose what is a very high top marginal rate of 45%, for instance. Nor is the idea of making an ‘iconic’ tax proposal just to have a handy catchphrase with which to compete with Labour and the Liberal Democrats redolent of good policymaking or government.

But this is a problem that affects people up and down the income scale, and the idea of giving some relief to those slightly higher up the scale deserved more than the immediate dismissal that it received from David Cameron. As the Telegraph continues:

Mr Cameron on Wednesday defended the government’s focus on increasing the tax free threshold. 

Asked if Tory back-benchers were right to call for the 40p threshold to be raised, Mr Cameron said: “I’m a tax cutting conservative. I want to see us relieve people’s tax burden. We’ve chosen to do that through raising the personal allowance which helps everyone earning under £100,000.”

David Cameron, the tax cutting conservative. It sounds good, but it is hardly an accurate claim.

When Cameron says that “we’ve chosen” to raise the personal allowance, he neglects to admit that this was a Liberal Democrat, not a Conservative policy. Had the LibDems not manoeuvred their way into coalition government, the Conservatives would likely never have entertained the idea of a personal allowance up to or exceeding £10,000. Now that he is also rejecting the idea of doing anything at all about the 40% tax band – either scrapping it or increasing the level at which it applies – he is committed to doing nothing significant for middle income earners either.

This leaves only those who earn enough to qualify for Gordon Brown’s new top rate of income tax, which George Osborne reduced from 50% to 45%. And that is the situation currently faced by the Conservative Party – the only concrete actions of this ‘tax cutting conservative’ party have been to cut the taxes for the very highest earners. This track record is every bit as bad as the optics make it seem.

Ed Miliband and the Labour Party like to talk about the “cost of living crisis”, and they are right to do so. Aside from the fact that there is obvious electoral mileage to be gained, someone needs to talk about the fact that despite the better economic news of late, wages remain stagnant while inflation continues to eat away at purchasing power. Economic growth means absolutely nothing to people if it is not reflected in their own personal circumstances.

At some point soon, people might start realising that another UK economic recovery built on booming property prices alone is unsustainable and undesirable. And when this happens, the focus will turn to consumer spending, and why it isn’t more buoyant.

Perhaps then the foolishness of treating ever more British wage earners as higher rate taxpayers will become more readily apparent.

The Church vs Welfare Reform

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, has inserted the Catholic church squarely into the centre of the debate about welfare reform and deficit reduction.

The accusations that he makes are serious, and are directed squarely at the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government – namely, that the social safety net has been ripped up in the period following the 2010 general election:

 

The Telegraph reports on their interview with the Archbishop which launched the story into the news cycle:

Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has accused the Coalition of leaving increasing numbers of people facing “hunger and destitution”.

Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that while the need to reduce spending on benefits is widely accepted, the Government’s reforms have now destroyed even the “basic safety net”.

Archbishop Nichols, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

The Guardian follows up with a report detailing the extent to which Archbishop Nichols has been ‘inundated’ with messages of support:

In his Telegraph interview, published on Saturday, Nichols accused ministers of tearing apart the safety net that protects people from hunger and destitution. He said since he made those comments he had been “inundated with accounts from people … saying there are indeed many cases where people are left without benefits, without any support, for sometimes weeks on end”.

The criticism has clearly rankled the government, and not just the Work & Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (himself a practicing Roman Catholic). Indeed, the rebuke was such that David Cameron himself felt the need to respond to the church’s criticism. Writing in The Telegraph, Cameron made a convincing argument in support of his government’s welfare reform:

For me the moral case for welfare reform is every bit as important as making the numbers add up: building a country where people aren’t trapped in a cycle of dependency but are able to get on, stand on their own two feet and build a better life for themselves and their family.

Let’s be clear about the welfare system we inherited. It was a system where in too many cases people were paid more to be on benefits than to be in work. A system where people could claim unlimited amounts of housing benefit – in London there were people claiming truly astonishing sums of £60,000, £70,000, £80,000 a year. A system where hundreds of thousands of people were put on Incapacity Benefit and never reassessed, essentially taken off the books and forgotten about. None of these things is defensible. And it is right both economically – and morally – to change them.

The founders of our welfare system believed in the principle of responsibility – and so do we. As I said on the steps of Downing Street on my first night as Prime Minister, “those who can should, those who can’t we will always help”. Those who can’t work will be always supported, but those who can work have the responsibility to do so. The welfare system should never take that responsibility away.

In all of this, one gets the sense that the two sides are talking at cross purposes with one another. The government is eager to stress the need to work pay for the majority, while the Church is more keen to focus on any potential iniquities in marginal cases, stemming from welfare reform. And while these marginal cases often deserve full attention and consideration, there is never any real acceptance by the Church that the welfare system requires fixing of any kind in the first place. For all of the noise generated in the wake of the Archbishop’s interview we are no closer to understanding what the Church would prefer to see in place of the coalition government’s reforms.

How much stronger would Archbishop Nichols’ intervention have been if he had proposed something radical to replace Iain Duncan Smith’s incremental reforms? Some might argue that it is not the Church’s place to propose new policy, but if an organisation as large and respected as the Catholic Church disagrees with current government policy on welfare, it would only benefit the country if they made public their best thinking as to how to move forward with reform given the current economic constraints.

The Catholic Church is deeply embedded in communities throughout the entire United Kingdom. What if they were to use that proximity and understanding to propose some better reforms, rather than engaging in fruitless hand-wringing from the sidelines?

vincentnichols

 

If the Church feels that it is the right time to make a contribution to the debate about welfare spending, then this should be welcomed and taken seriously. But it becomes harder to do so when the intervention is so piecemeal and one-sided in nature, failing to look at the historical context of the welfare problem or proposing alternatives when specific policies are to be attacked. The Church has a responsibility to pay attention to the debate from the start and to at least attempt to gain an understanding for the reasoning behind government policy, and not just to repeat Labour Party talking points.

A sense of missed opportunity now pervades the coverage of the entire debate.

It is certainly the case that living on standard benefits – Jobseeker’s Allowance or Employment Support Allowance – is practically impossible in many parts of the country, particularly for those who unexpectedly fall on hard times and who are unable to trim their expenditures with the same brutal speed at which their income evaporates. This is worthy of discussion, and sensible changes could be made along lines previously suggested on this blog.

It is also true that new measures recently put in place can make benefit claimants subject to sanctions for failing to comply with what are sometimes confusing and arbitrary procedures. This too could have been discussed seriously and in detail. Nichols goes so far as to call this a ‘disgrace’:

[Archbishop Vincent Nichols] said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

While it is true that such sanctions do exist, what is missing from Nichols’ interview is any acknowledgement of the problem that the sanctions exist to counter – the number of claimants who do (or did) not make sufficient efforts to find new employment. If it is the Church’s position that those who do not make reasonable efforts to find work should never be penalised for their inaction, this is something that should be explicitly admitted.

In short, it is all well and good to attack the impact of austerity on welfare recipients here and now in 2014, but one wonders where was the Church’s criticism when Gordon Brown and the Labour Party made so many millions more people dependent on state assistance and more vulnerable to the cuts in government spending which would always have been inevitable in the event of recession?

There is a strong sense – at least from Archbishop Nichols’ first intervention in the debate – that the strategy of the Church will be to attack the people now trying to fix the budgetary mess left by the last government, and to accuse them of cruelty and neglect, while turning a blind eye toward the misguided politics and personalities of the people who did so much to make the poorest Britons more vulnerable and dependent on the state.

It will be a shame if the Labour Party really is to get a free pass in this debate, as the Conservatives are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the guidance and prompting toward social justice potentially offered by the Catholic Church. In the past, too many from the Labour Party have been content to parade around loudly talking about how compassionate they are (and that the other side is heartless by virtue of their lack of faith in government provision by default), and so are given a free pass when their badly conceived ideas inevitably go wrong during implementation.

On this, though, the Cardinal-elect is absolutely right:

He concluded: “The moral challenge roots back to the principle that we have to regard and treat every single person with respect. That’s one of the great geniuses of Pope Francis – that he manages in his gestures to show that respect to even the most unlovely of people.”

Absolutely. And where the welfare system or the austerity programme is helping rather than hindering this effort, it is absolutely right to point it out. It is all too easy to begin reducing human lives and human suffering to statistics, to black and white numbers on a  pre-budget report or a policy paper, and if nothing else, Archbishop Nichols did service to the debate by pointing this out and giving voice to some of the unheard suffering.

But if there is a war on poor people currently underway in Britain, it has been waged just as much by those on the ‘compassionate’ left who sought to make more and more people dependent on government benefits and tax credits as it has been by the new coalition government which had the unenviable task of repairing the economic damage wrought by thirteen years of Labour rule. If the Conservatives are to be blamed for undermining the social safety net, why should Labour escape censure for vastly overfilling it in the first place, causing the weight of the full net to threaten the buoyancy of the whole ship?

One cannot help but feel that the voice of the church – a serious and valued voice in our national debate – would have a lot more credibility on the topic of if, when they spoke, they gave the slightest indication that they had been paying equal attention to the plight of welfare recipients before David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street.

The Day We Fight Back

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

thedaywefightback

 

Sometimes help comes from the most unlikely places. That was certainly the case today when Ed Miliband used his speech at the Hugo Young memorial lecture to call for major changes to the oversight of Britain’s intelligence and security agencies.

The Guardian reports:

A major overhaul of the oversight of Britain’s intelligence agencies, which could lead to an opposition politician chairing parliament’s intelligence and security committee and reform of the intelligence commissioners, needs to be introduced, Ed Miliband has said.

The Labour leader praised Barack Obama for starting an “important debate” in the US – after the White House appointed a panel in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks – and called for a similar debate in Britain.

In some of his most extensive comments on the NSA leaks, Miliband told a Guardian audience that reforming the oversight of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 was “definitely” part of his campaign to challenge “unaccountable power”.

Though the details remain sketchy, it appears that Miliband envisions quite a far-reaching review, looking not just at the methods used by the security services but also the degree to which the agencies are funded, the scope of their responsibilities and the granting of a more formal role in oversight to the main opposition party:

Miliband made clear that his challenge to “unaccountable power” would include Britain’s intelligence agencies as he said that reform should focus on two areas. These are parliament’s all party intelligence and security committee, which is always chaired by a senior MP from the governing party, and the commissioners who oversee the intelligence agencies.

The Labour leader said: “I already believe, and this is what my Labour colleagues have been saying, that there are clearly changes that are going to need to be made in relation to the intelligence and security committee and the oversight it provides.

“That is everything from the resources they have at their disposal, who chairs the committee and whether it should be somebody from the government party or the opposition party, their power to compel witnesses – a range of issues.

While this may warm the heart of many a weary libertarian, it must be noted that Miliband has barely scratched the surface in terms of confronting the growth of the British national security apparatus – after all, even miracles have their limits.

Miliband praises US President Barack Obama for starting what he calls an “important debate” but neglects to mention that Obama would have quite happily allowed the NSA to continue to violate the privacy of US and world citizens in secrecy and in perpetuity, and that he is actively seeking to extradite the person who really started the debate – Edward Snowden – back to America to face charges of treason. Thus restated in the proper context, Obama’s carefully cultivated philosopher-king image begins to lose some of its sheen, as does Miliband’s boyish admiration of him.

It should also be noted that Miliband sees the answer to concerns about privacy and civil liberties very much in terms of incremental changes to the existing framework, and certainly not in creating cast-iron rules about powers that the government should rightly have and those which should be reserved by the people.  In particular, he sees the fact of ministerial oversight and sign-off of interception requests by the security agencies as a good thing and a solid check on power, rather than the rubber stamp that it really is:

On the ministerial oversight of interception, he said: “It is worth saying also that there is in this country … ministerial sign off when intercept and so on takes place. That is a very, very important safeguard. I do believe the intelligence services do important work. But I absolutely endorse the idea that there are important issues of liberty and liberty is an important part of Labour’s agenda.”

Perhaps Miliband (or indeed David Cameron or Theresa May) would care to set out a scenario – any scenario at all – where the British intelligence services might approach the government to get sign-off for a communication intercept on a surveillance target and actually be rebuffed by a skeptical minister. It simply would never happen.

Elected politicians, weighing the likely fallout of two different courses of action, are almost always going to follow the path that chips away at civil liberties by approving the intercept request rather than defending privacy and denying the request on grounds of insufficient evidence, and later being implicated in a security failure. Decisions on the authorisation of communications intercepts should rest with the judiciary, not the executive.

It is certainly true that public opinion in Britain has not swelled with outrage at the revelations of NSA and GCHQ collaboration in collecting and viewing private communications data with no reason for suspicion and no warrant.

And so Miliband’s contribution to the British debate on privacy and (remarkably) constraints on the power of the state – a very muted, anaemic debate compared to that now taking place in many other countries – is welcome, and very important. In America, politicians from both main parties and of all temperaments have spoken out in condemnation of secret government surveillance, raising public awareness and, in some cases, making continued support for these draconian surveillance measures an electoral liability. Meanwhile, the British political establishment has largely closed ranks in defence of the national security complex, and against the people.

berniesandersNSA

Contrast this quote from the independent Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders, with Prime Minister David Cameron’s dismissive and aloof response to concerns about the practices of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ:

“We have very good rules in this country. If a telephone call is going to be listened in to, that has to be signed off by the Home Secretary personally. There are very good safeguards in place,” Cameron told ITV’s The Agenda. “You get asked, ‘What are the rules’? I’m satisfied we have pretty strong safeguards. I thought part of the reaction to the The Guardian story was – big surprise, spies learn to spy…it’s to help keep us safe.”

Does the fact that Ed Miliband took the first tentative step in support of civil liberties and dared to suggest the state should not be all-powerful over us mean that the torch has been passed to a new generation of leaders on the issue? Of course not. Miliband seems to place his complete faith in the power of the state to accomplish a whole range of other matters relating to the personal and private lives of the British people, and it is far from certain a this early stage that he is not simply using his Hugo Young lecture to score a few cheap political points with no intention of pursuing the matter any further.

But for perhaps the first time in his senior political career, Miliband spoke out in favour of the private citizen over the government, when the issue of government surveillance has been met with nothing more than dismissal and condescension by Number 10 Downing Street and the rest of the government. And for that action, he must be given some credit.

Today, February 11th 2014, has been labelled The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance. Numerous websites are carrying links to the organisation, which is supported by more than 360 organisations in 70 countries, and which plans to petition lawmakers in these countries to take action on the serious issue of government surveillance and constitutional overreach.

The Day We Fight Back has been well-marked in the United States, with many prominent politicians adding their voices to the chorus of protest. In the UK, on the other hand, there has been a deadly silence. The focus of the British news media and the political class remains fixed on the issues of flooding in southern England, with elected politicians falling over themselves to be seen in photo opportunities surveying the damage and taking decisive action. Taking any kind of action in support of our right to privacy and freedom from government oversight is far down the list of priorities, where it even features at all.

Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul is not right about everything, but his warning about the loss of liberty, echoing Franklin, is pertinent and timeless:

ronpaulwarning

People in Britain who truly appreciate the importance of the right to privacy and the need to place constraints of any kind on government seem to be few and far between, and consequently we must look for allies in unlikely corners.

Ed Miliband’s is certainly the very unlikeliest of corners. But perhaps the Labour leader’s taking a stand for civil liberties will shame others – those who should have been holding this issue aloft all along, and warning of the dangers of an omniscient, omnipotent government – into finally doing the same.

 

Concerned readers can visit The Day We Fight Back website and add their name to a petition here.

Where Are The Women In British Politics?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Blair Babes women British politics

 

The conventional wisdom holds that Ed Miliband managed to land a serious blow on David Cameron at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, exposing the Tory leader and his party for their chronic shortage of women in leadership positions and the key offices of state. Miliband makes a good point – an abysmal 4 out of 22 cabinet ministers in the coalition government are women, and only one of those, Theresa May at the Home Office, occupies a position that really matters (Culture, Northern Ireland and International Development, the other ministries headed by women, are either irrelevant or decidedly junior-league). That simply is not good enough, and David Cameron has just cause to feel ashamed.

The Guardian makes the case:

[David Cameron] was taunted about the Conservatives’ “women problem” by Ed Miliband in the same week it emerged several prominent women have recently been sacked from government jobs and Anne McIntosh, a high-profile female Tory MP, was deselected by her local association.

The Labour leader also claimed a prominent businesswoman, who is the wife of a Tory donor, had been greeted by Cameron with the remark: “Where’s your husband?”

He then accused the coalition of failing women across the UK by allowing the pay gap between men and women to widen for the first time in five years.

“You promised to modernise your party, but you are going backwards. You run your government like the old boys’ network – that’s why you are failing women across your party and across the country,” Miliband said.

And the initial exchange between the two leaders at Prime Minister’s Question Time can be seen here:

 

Less reported is the fact that the Labour Party has a record on promoting women every bit as appalling as do the Conservatives, as Dan Hodges correctly observes in his Telegraph column:

Women still aren’t allowed to hold senior positions in the Labour party. The three major political briefs are Prime Minister/Leader, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary. Apart from a short period during the fag end of Tony Blair’s administration when Margaret Beckett was placed in charge of the Foreign Office, and 14 weeks when Yvette Cooper oversaw the shadow post under Ed Miliband, none of those offices have been held by women. The Labour party has been in existence for 114 years. And during that time – under Labour – a woman has held or shadowed one of three major offices of state for a period of 14 months.

Fourteen months. And yet you would not think that Labour was sitting on such a poor record when Ed Miliband stood preening at the dispatch box in the Commons on Wednesday. One could have been forgiven for thinking that women made up a statistically and politically perfect 51% of Labour seats in Parliament and in the shadow cabinet, particularly given the rather unusual concentration of the Labour Party’s female talent on the front bench alongside their leader:

When PMQs started, several people commented on the fact that a number of Labour’s women shadow cabinet members were artificially concertinaed together close to Miliband. The reason they did that was because if they hadn’t done that they wouldn’t have been in camera shot. And that’s because there’s a convention that people sit alongside their leader based on seniority.

If something about the picture below strikes you as odd – don’t worry. There is indeed something different about the Labour front bench at PMQs this week – namely, a lot more women clustered on either side of Eds Miliband and Balls than is usually the case. It is hard to determine which is worse – Ed Miliband’s disingenuous photo opportunity, or the willingness of a number of female Labour MPs to go along with it by essentially allowing themselves to be used as props by their leadership.

Not your standard distribution.
Not your standard distribution.

 

A less-reported fact amid the furore is that all four women cabinet ministers in the coalition government are Conservative MPs, which rather begs the question of how the Liberal Democrats have managed to fly under the radar and avoid being called out for their own shameful inability to recognise and promote female talent within their own ranks. But somehow the party of Lord Rennard seems to be scoring a free pass on their own institutional sexism for the time being – at least as far as Ed Miliband’s focus is concerned.

The lack of women in senior positions in all political parties is a real problem, one which Miliband does little to debate or address by trading barbs with the Prime Minister. Some advocate all-woman shortlists as a solution to the problem, and of course the Labour Party has adopted this particular approach. This blog disagrees with it – firstly on the grounds that it robs local constituencies of the opportunity to select from the widest possible pool of talent when choosing who they want to represent them in Parliament, and secondly because if we must tolerate reverse discrimination as a necessary evil to help put right historic wrongs (and I’m far from convinced that we should), it should be done at the earliest stage possible and certainly not at the point of parliamentary candidate selection.

But while we may condemn Miliband’s posturing on the subject and question his methods, we must also acknowledge that at least the Labour Party under Ed Miliband is engaged in a bona fide effort to increase the number of women in their parliamentary party. There is a lot of rueful head-shaking from the Conservatives at the conspicuous lack of women in theirs, but not much action of any kind at all.

Four women out of twenty-two cabinet members in the British government, in the year 2014. This is a national scandal, far more serious than localised spats about the deselection or resignation of individual constituency MPs, or accusations of politicising quango appointments. This is about the integrity of our democracy and our desire to be a more practically and visibly meritocratic country.

The Conservatives, the party of Margaret Thatcher, should be leading the charge on anything to do with meritocracy. The fact that they are not currently doing so is alarming.