For anyone with no idea what a internship is – basically employers offer a program that gives students, new graduates or ‘gap-year kids’the opportunity to get ‘work-experience’for the company, unpaid, often for a University summer, sometimes for much longer. The argument goes that that the company is doing the kid a favour – these aren’t real jobs, really just admin – but it gives the interns a ‘foot-in-the-door’, a ‘network of contacts in the industry’, the chance to check it is really the right industry for them and most importantly the magic ‘experience’to add to their CV. This helps escape the job-seeker’s paradox that you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. The employers are often so impressed with interns that at the end job offers may be made. When presented like that it sounds like the company is doing a great social good. ‘Helping job-seekers!’. Very worthy. The reality isn’t quite so straightforward nor is it the win-win for all it first appeared.

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I am a huge advocate of the importance of both meritocracy and competition (see my philosophy page). Meritocracy is key to social mobility, which in turn is key to attaining social justice. As we drift to internships becoming a ‘cultural norm’in the UK we’re creating a blocker to meritocracy. In the long run this will harm our economy and society.

When you listen to the work that interns really do they are typically not ‘work-experience’in the sense of shadowing someone doing their day-job or having a go while the incumbent looks on. No, more normally they have interns doing ‘real jobs’. They’re expected to arrive and work set hours, and often kicked out of the program if they do not. They have set administrative duties to perform which keep the business going. To me this crosses the line from ‘work experience’to outright exploitation. If the interns weren’t doing this work then somebody in paid employment would be. That person would then be off the unemployment register and paying tax and NI and pumping those earnings back into the economy. Instead we have them still on the dole whilst the student extends their debt and works for free with no guarantee of any reward at the end. I can only spot one real winner in the arrangement.

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We need to consider who has the means to take internships: Who can offer three months of their lives working without pay, living in a big city? Only people with alternative financial support. Straight away that excludes a whole chunk of society. The kids from the estates to who we’ve been preaching if they work hard they can achieve anything; who then put their heads-down, ignored the peer-pressure, worked hard, got the GCSEs and A-Levels, went to Uni and got the 2-1 or first degree’s now find themselves stuck in the old job-seeker’s paradox and flipping burgers, angry and disenchanted with society and saddled with university debt. Meanwhile, the well-to-do kid who scraped through their GCSEs and A-Levels thanks to the kind of one-on-one educational attention you only get at the best independent schools, who drank their way through uni but pulled their socks up just enough to get an OK 2:2 sails into the intern post because they can stay with Mum and Dad and have an allowance. They get the magic experience on the CV, they get the contacts and the reference, they get the end job. Now, they may well be ‘able’enough to do the job, but the ‘better’candidate has missed out. That stinks to me every bit as much as those well meaning, misguided affirmative action plans companies have in place. Both spit in the face of the idea of meritocracy.

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The trend is embedding. In some industries it is almost becoming a pre-requisite to entry that you have done an internship. We must level this playing field. It pains me to say it, because by nature I’m against regulation but to get proper meritocracy and competition working we should legistlate that if the internship has the characteristics of real employment then legally it must be treated as such with a formal contract, fair selection process, and at least a minimum wage salary. In the long run this will be a real win-win for every player in the economy.

Rather than wait for such regulation I hope the companies realise now that they are being short-sighted by saving pennies here which could cost them pounds later. The barrier to entry means they’re potentially missing out the very best, hungriest talent. The outlay of paying minimum wage for administrative support is minimal. The return on genuinely recruiting the best people into your firm for the long-run will pay back that tenfold. Meritocracy is not just good for society – it is good for business too.

[This is a rehash of an article on the subject I first wrote in Nov 2009]

• You would not want someone so intimately connected with the entire economic calamity facing this country back on point for economic policy
• You could not want someone who has had an insider view (and leading role) in using the office of Chancellor to undermine and oust a previous leader, sitting there ready for another metaphoric stab.

Well, nothings changed.  Those reasons still stand.  Yet here Balls is.  He’s got the job he craved from the moment he realised he was out-of-the game for the last leadership shot, and young Ed will be feeling his breath on his neck from here-on-in.

To give him his due Balls is a bruiser.  A political big-beast.  From today George Osborne will be looking forward to his turns in Parliament with a tummy rumble.  Balls knows his stats and figures and will not be easy to trip up.  Worse, he’s more than capable of scoring some points through sheer statistical battery.   But that’s all just fluff in the Westminster village.   Balls fundamentally is the living, breathing embodiment of the leftish or centre-leftish vision of Big Government/Big State/Spend and Tax Labour.  As Shadow Chancellor he will push them more so.  Even with all the current national woes, when push comes to shove that positioning is simply electoral poison.   The ‘squeezed middle’– the people who count – the very people who switched to Labour in 97 and switched away from them in 2010 – those floating voters just don’t drift in that direction.

And that is the reel rub for Labour.  The one man on the Labour front bench who could appeal to that ‘thinking middle’was Alan Johnson.  He was simply impossible to dislike.  Even though he was struggling to catch-up with his brief, even though he talked rot – people, even me, warmed to him.   For a politician that curious ‘nice bloke’charisma is the X-factor stuff.  It is priceless political alchemy.  Blair had it.  Johnson had it.  Brown didn’t.  Balls doesn’t.   And so the Labour party is a weaker party this evening.

—–

As I say, for reasons I cannot put my finger on I like Alan Johnson despite his politics.  I have no idea why he has stepped down.  I wish him well and sincerely hope that whatever the personal issues are they are the kind that can be put right and have a happy ending by making this move.

The Government has to accept this and hold its nerve.   It cannot do what it needs to do and be popular in the immediate or short term.  It needs, in the national interest, to do the right thing rather than the popular thing.  With eyes wide-open it needs to understand that its popularity will fall this year and it needs to carry on regardless.  The instinct and philosophy of this government is the right one.  The challenge now is to be competent in delivery.   The quicker we get the pain over, the quicker we start the recovery.  If we start the recovery then the short-term unpopularity will dwindle and we have a fighting chance of re-election in 2015.  Dither and spread the pain over the whole five years and even if the objective of shoring up the economy is met it will just gift the country back to Labour to mess up again.

Labour will blame the Coalition for the pain. They’ll say: “They’re in Government.  We’re not.  It is their choices, it is their fault”  This is a bit like blaming a doctor for making you ill with chemo rather than the fags you only gave up six months earlier.  Nevertheless, while the pain is there the public will buy their argument.  The Coalition needs to see its program through and see it through quickly.

The lessons are there in History.  Those who remember the 1981 budget may spot certain parallels with today.  For the whole period between of 80 and 82  it was inconceivable that the Conservatives would be returned to power.  Nerve was held.  The budget worked.  Britain, after the pain, prospered.   Thatcher would have won even without the Falklands.   But we must also learn from that period.  Nobody would want to see the likes of the Brixton or Toxteth riots again.  That’s why it is so crucial that we don’t just deliver on the miserable austerity side of the program –  but also on the social side – IDS has made his case well for welfare reform – he needs to be allowed to now get on and deliver .  This is the year to get moving.   It’s also critical that we strike the right balance in the way we police inevitable protests.  Get that wrong and the Government could doom itself.

So on that dour note, I say again:  Happy New Year.  Put the armour on, 2011 is going to Hurt.

Does this matter?  Up until very recently I would have argued it didn’t.  Let’s face it, the people in the blogosphere endlessly retweeting the same political articles to each other would always have been died-in-the-wool supporters of whichever party regardless.  The political blogosphere draws-in political anoraks like moths to a flame.  The floating voters who matter simply give it a wide berth.   My gut instinct was just to let the left get on with their ‘Slacktivism’.  Those banal campaigns consisting of “click on this to express your rage at the cuts” or whatever.  They’ve confused bleating into the ether with meaningful action.  They’ve kidded themselves they’re doing good with empty gestures.  My attitude has always been if it makes them feel worthy, they’re doing no harm so let them get on with it.  Meanwhile, as they are retweeting each other, us grown-ups can go out and take real action to make our schools and hospitals or whatever else around us better.

Recently though, they seem to have reached a critical mass and realised that they were achieving little.  They are finally making the giant leap to real ‘action’.  Suddenly it is quite scary.  We have a single line in Private Eye hinting in its usual mischievous style that ‘Vodaphone owe £6bn in tax’, and then via a web campaign this leads to real direct action on the streets.  Not ‘action’in the sense of working through the norms of society (investigative fact checking, lobbying, getting legislation etc.) but ‘direct action’in the 1960s/70s “let’s have fun causing trouble” sense.

Folk self-select their fact sources from the internet – as they do with newspapers – to confirm their prejudices.  People who read the Guardian will also tend to bookmark ‘Left Foot Forwards’, ‘UK Uncut’, ‘False Economy’, ‘The Other Taxpayers Alliance’etc.  You could make a similar self-selecting list for those who lean to the right.  The thing is that those who lean to the left are, by nature, happier to run with the herd.   Once a leftist feels part of ‘a movement’they can be far more disciplined at toeing the party line.   ‘Solidarity’and ‘Unity’have always been more crucial to the left than ‘free thinking’and ‘reason’.  Those who understand the power of all this seem to be gleefully manipulating it to edge the mainstream left even further left.  Once they’ve got their new foot-soldiers engaged – which they are doing well – they can wreak havoc.  That £6bn ‘tax-dodge’figure for Vodaphone from Private Eye is a powerful example.   Clearly it is a dodgy figure based in little more than tittle-tattle – and yet it is accepted as an absolute fact by a whole ‘movement’to the point that people are willing to commit criminal damage in outrage.   We have also seen the power of this ‘Movement Activism’with the student protests.

I’m not sure what the proper response from the centre-right should be but  I do know what the wrong response would be:  The last thing we need is for the mainstream right to blindly drift further right as a anxious response to baiting.  My idea of how politics should be conducted remains through the normal channels and ballot box – not by violent confrontations with leftist thugs having a jolly day out at a demonstration/riot.   We are living in testing economic times.   Testing economic times have always created an environment to radicalise people.   New technology can be a real catalyst to that radicalisation process.  We need to watch it and keep level heads.

Every press release I sent out, every letter of protest that was written, every person who gave me the opportunity to bend-their-ear got the same message.  It seemed to me to be self-evident that the introduction of student fees could only:

• Lead to lower take-up of Higher Ed across the board
• More worryingly – lead to even greater social exclusion for those from poorer backgrounds
• Lead to University closures and a diminishing of Britain’s academic standing

The only crumbs of comfort I could think of was that if students were paying they would become far more fussy and demanding which would drive up the standard of tuition.

Here’s the weird thing:  I’ve never been more wrong with a set of predictions in my life.  The take up of higher education went up and up.  This includes an increase in take-up from people from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Far from closures the number of higher education institutions and overall capacity increased.  I was wrong on every count.  The anecdotal evidence I have is that even my certainty that tuition standards and one-on-one teaching time would improve was  off.  I still find just how wrong I was quite sobering.

I obviously mention this now, because with today’s announcement that fees will increase to between £6,ooo and £9,000 per year the current crop of Student Union Presidents up and down the land are making the very same points as the once fresher-faced me.

Despite being proved spectacularly wrong on this issue in the ‘90s, to be honest I am still as nervous this time around.  I can’t sit here all smug that I got through the system with fees paid for and a maintenance grant because  I now have to worry about how my own two kids will afford the opportunities I had.  At some point we surely must hit the tipping point?  There has to be a cost that will put people off?  The headline £27k for a degree before living costs does sound overwhelming.

This prompted me to dig a little deeper into the detail of what is proposed.  As is so often the case the reality of the detail isn’t quite as alarming as the screaming headline – but it is still scary.  The proposals have students only repaying their loans at 9% of their income at a real rate of interest when they earn £21,000, up to inflation plus 3% for those earning £41,000 or more.   Any outstanding loans are written off after 30 years.  If you don’t end up in employment, you don’t pay anything back.  In terms of the technicalities of repayment and pressure to repay these proposals are actually a step forward from the current arrangements – though of course the overall amount to be repaid is much higher – but a step forward nonetheless.  A kind of ‘no-win, no fee’arrangement.

It is still a whopping burden though.  I really do pity the kids who start life with that kind of debt, on top of already silly marginal tax rates to pay for the excesses of their parents’generation.

Of course, Labour will oppose these moves.  That’s the nature and job of opposition.  There is no need to put forward an alternative, you can just yell ‘nay’.  The media will ignore that it was the Labour Government (actually Mandelson) who commissioned the Browne Report in 2009 that led to these changes.  In many ways this is history repeating itself.   In 1996 the then Conservative Government appointed Ron Dearing to do an ‘independent’report knowing full well the recommendations that Blair and Blunkett would inherit and which led to the first tuition fees.  This time Mandelson and G. Brown knew full well what would be recommended by Lord Browne and that whoever won would have to go with it.  One silver lining for the loser of this last election was always going to be not having to catch and deal with being lobbed this particular ticking grenade.

The Coalition have actually watered down Browne’s recommendations a bit.  There is a cap on fees (albeit a quite high one), and there is more money for bursaries for the poor and early repayment levies so that the richer folk can’t get out of paying their share by paying off their loan early.

It is what it is.  The choice was always either to revisit student funding or cut back on HE provision.  Access to Higher Ed benefits the whole of society and so it was the right choice to revisit funding.

The changes are necessary but still depressing.  All I can do is hope that the weird thing happens again and that effects of student financing policy continue to be subject to counter-intuitive economic freakery that prove me, and all those earnest fresh-faced student union presidents, totally wrong.

Sir Philip Green’s report on government spending  is now online.  Unlike most Government reports it’s a succinct thirty page slide deck in big print that can be read in five minutes.   If that’s too much then I’ll give you the gist:  he finds the government wastes money then concludes we must centralise buying.

I’ve no issue at all with his findings.  The examples he cites confirm everything we already suspected about wasteful and lazy Government procurement.  Some of the examples are jaw-dropping.  I’ve also no issue with his central theme that the Government has failed miserably to take advantage of its scale or credit rating.  On that he’s right.  He  obviously knows a trick or two about keeping hold of money so I feel a bit cheeky calling him out here –  but  I have to:  The findings might be good, the theme sound, but his conclusion is wrong.

It is nuts to propose that a problem of poor or lazy administration will be solved by more bureaucracy.   The Coalition Government is rightly extolling the virtues of localism at the core of its agenda.  There is an obvious intellectual contradiction between pushing localism and enforcing centralised procurement.  The last thing we need to do now is set up yet another Government Agency that would literally be the ‘Ministry for Paper-Clips’.  No matter how well intentioned it would fail.   I’ve spent long enough working with big business watching the pendulum swing back and forth from localised  business models to centralised models to know that the prize of lower procurement costs will come at the expense of agility and innovation.  It is in this agility and innovation that the very biggest prizes lie.

The diversity of Government activity is not comparable with running a chain of identical Top Shops.  If the proposal goes ahead you can imagine the scenario – a nimble cost-cutting  government department identifies a new way to deliver a service at a fraction of the cost of the existing way.  The project to implement it will need new kit.  Being new stuff, the central agency doesn’t have it on its catalogue – cue a tedious process to get into the approved kit list, another process to approve possible vendors, another process to then raise the purchase orders.  All these no doubt delayed because the new ministry is dealing with back-logs from every department and school and council and prison in the country for their regular stuff.  At the same time you would also be crushing the ability of SMEs to tender for government business as there is no way they would have the scale to operate at a whole government level rather than at a smaller niche.  Hurting that part of the British economy is not something we should be engineering.  Instead, we’re supposed to be marching into a brave new post-bureaucratic age and Green’s proposal runs counter to that end.

No, the answer to all the issues that Green has identified can be solved by removing the veil of bureaucracy  and accelerating proposals for complete transparency of  Government data on-line.   Every single contract and purchase order for more than £500 should be there for everyone to see.   It is our tax money so the spend data is our data.  Arguments by vendors about contract  ‘commercial sensitivity’ are a sham ,they don’t want it exposed they are ripping us off.  The public has a right to see that vendors are not charging the government more than they charge in the high street.  Overnight, by publishing all this data you would free-up departmental procurement officers to see what is the going-rate or a fair price.  More importantly you would allow commercial competitors to see the price they need to compete with. This more than anything  would continually drive prices downwards.  Rather than a procurement officer going to a vendor and saying “I need 10,000 of x what is our agreed price?”  You would have vendors ringing procurement officers and saying “I see you bought 10,000 x and paid y – in future I can do it z cheaper”.   You would stop at once the procurement officer who buys the slightly more expensive stuff because he gets more air miles or because the vendor sent him on a nice day-at-the-races during the bid.  The armchair auditors (or the press) would not allow it.  Transparency is to everyone’s advantage.  It will retain our localism agenda and leave space for agility and innovation in departments.  It will also mean we don’t need to waste time or money setting up a Ministry of Paper Clips.

I suspect I’ll be in the minority in my acceptance though.  The Government is living its promise to do the right thing rather than the popular thing – and I suspect that this will be wildly unpopular.

One genuine issue that people have been quick to highlight is that there is one group who this will impact more than others:   This is single income families who earn just over the threshold.  They lose the benefit whilst families with a double income of salaries just less than the upper threshold retain the benefit.   In the very worst case example a couple who both earn 43k and so have a family income of £86k will keep the benefit, the single income family earning a fraction more the £44k will lose the benefit.   This anomaly is manifestly not equitable.

That said, people who are getting on some very high horses about this need to take a step back and reflect – this same anomaly has existed for years (including the entire 13 years of Labour rule) in that marginal rates already led to the same unfairness via income tax.  In the exact same examples above the couple with the single income has already been walloped at 40% for every extra pound they bring in, while the double income couple have only been banged for 25%.   I make the point to give context rather than as a justification.  Two wrongs don’t make a right – and obviously this new anomaly adds insult to injury for those people.

The anomaly aside (and by very definition any anomaly is an exception to the norm) George Osborne has still done the right thing.  He was between a rock and a hard place – to correct the anomaly and move to a solution that took total house-hold income/means-testing into the equation would have added an administration nightmare  – more forms, more IT systems, more opportunities for fraud all of which would eat away at the savings to be made – and the savings after all are the whole point of the move.   The solution adopted is pragmatic rather than perfect.  It can be very easily be implemented with existing tax data.  Those people with double incomes  just below the threshold should think of themselves as accidental winners rather than single income families just above it thinking of themselves as targeted losers.  The principle that high income earners do not require welfare support from the state is sound.

The spin that had been dripping out from Whitehall over the last few weeks could be summarised in one sentence: “This is going to Hurt”.  The facts about the economic situation were not in question –

• For every three pounds we currently receive in tax receipts we are spending four on public services (i.e we have a significant structural deficit).
• The National Debt is already £22,400 per head.

The nation could not go on spending like drunken sailors on shore-leave.  You cannot tackle the debt until you tackle the structural deficit.  You can only tackle the structural deficit in one of two ways – raise taxes or cut public spending.  The trouble for George Osborne is that neither is a popular thing for a Government to do.  But in some ways the choice was made for him, as he put it, “We are over-spending – We are not under-taxed”.  So with an impossible juggling trick demanded what is my gut reaction to what he has done today?

Well he had some pleasant surprises that may confuse those who cannot see the Tories as anything other than the ‘nasty party’:

• The increase in the tax-fee allowance was inspired and will benefit those on the lowest pay.  I fully acknowledge that this was a Lib Dem policy but it is a credit to our Coalition that we really have cherry picked the best thinking from both Parties.  880,000 of the poorest working people taken out of tax.  Wonderful.
• The raise in Capital Gains Tax will mean that the wealthiest in our society cannot be accused of not shouldering their share of the burden.  Those who thought the Tories were all about protecting the rich ahead of helping the economy have been proved wrong.
• His surrender of forecasting powers to the Office for Budget Responsibility is absolutely the right thing to do for the country – but removes a key ability for him to ‘play politics’.  The best thing Brown ever did as Chancellor was give up the power to play politics with interest rates – Osborne takes this to the logical next step.
• The acknowledgement that the banks brought about the financial crisis and the new measures to tax riskier aspects of their behaviour will be in tune with popular feeling and was the right thing to do.
• Restoring the link between state pensions and earnings.
• As a small-business owner I was delighted with the measures he put in place to give us a fighting chance of getting through the recession.
• No cuts in capital expenditure.  A grown up lesson learned from the last time the Conservatives were in power in the early 1990s.

The headline will of course be about the rise in VAT.  For all the above the pain had to come and this is where the punch landed.  A tax on consumption does encourage individual prudence, but it also risks lowering consumer spending to the point that both retail and manufacturing are hurt.  The leap of faith (no doubt supported by economic modelling) must be that the proportional pain caused by the 2.5% rise is counterbalanced by the good to the economy from the reduction in structural deficit.  We need to monitor this closely and make sure the economic modelling is correct – if it backfires we shouldn’t shy away from course-correcting quickly.

Obviously, much of the pain is also going to be felt by the Civil Service when the departmental cuts have to be worked through and Councils as they struggle to work within the constraints brought about by a council tax freeze.  The challenge for both Civil Service and Councils will be to deliver those reductions with the same equity and tone that the Chancellor managed today – and crucially without hitting the public perception of service delivery.  Ultimately, for right or wrong, it will be that upon which the Coalition is judged.

Back in 2004 the integrity of Birmingham’s democracy was famously questioned by a Judge who found electoral conduct which would, in his exact words, “disgrace a banana republic.”* Fast forward to the 2010 General Election and I found myself as the Agent for the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Ladywood.  This is the same area that worried the judge six years earlier.  So, have things improved?  Well, – yes and no… they’ve started to solve the problem with postal votes, but things are getting worse at the polling stations.

So, let’s start with the polling stations.   I went to a sample of a dozen or so.  I was left wide-eyed with disbelief.  At every station which had ‘tellers’ (party activists) present there was a total disregard for the rules.  There is not supposed to be any campaign material within 100 meters of the entrance to a polling station.  This allows people to enter without fear or pressure.  In all the polling stations I saw there were activists aggressively handing out leaflets at the gates.  There was also campaign material (banners etc.) tied to the railings of the gates as people entered.  At the first polling station I went to there was a van with a full Labour logo on parked directly opposite the station entrance with a loud-speaker system on its roof.  It was literally broadcasting campaign messages into the polling station.  Any voter who wanted to get to the station could not enter without having literature hoist on them and verbal encouragement for particular candidates.  The leaflets were ‘helpful’ guides on how to vote – semi-official looking instructions to place an x in a particular box (with worked examples showing the candidates name and party logo).  Shockingly in two polling stations I found these leaflets had been left on the writing surface of the polling booths.  I’ll say that again – there was party campaign literature actually on display in the polling booths themselves.

I did speak with the Station Presiding Officers and they had all spoken with the activists at the entrances but had been ignored.  The police had been notified and attended but the activists had simply gone away when the police arrived and returned when they went.  In an earlier pre-election briefing the council had told me that the Police would have a dedicated single-point-of-contact to deal with any issues.  I decided ring them since the activists had such contempt for the Presiding Officer and I.   Not being a 999 matter I rang the police station directly.  I was on hold for over fifteen minutes without answer before I hung up.  I then tried the elections office at the council to report it – again I spent ten minutes on hold before I gave up waiting.  The activist army outside the polling station stayed put harassing arriving voters.

At the next station we found another gaggle of Labour activists handing out their material at the gates – cars were again parked opposite the entrance all with large Labour placards covering their windscreens on prominent display.  We went inside and found a Lib Dem activist actually handing out leaflets within the premises!  When challenged she broke down in tears.   According to her she had tried to position herself at the gates but had suffered such verbal abuse from the Labour activists that ‘she only felt safe inside the station’.  We offered her a lift to a ‘safe’ polling station.  ‘Rescuing’ an activist from another party was certainly the most surreal moment of the day.

Whilst driving the Lib Dem to ‘safety’ we finally found a Police Officer.  The PC had pulled over campaigners for an independent local council candidate who the Lib Dem referred to as ‘The Somalian’.  They were in a car with a tannoy set-up and had been broadcasting ‘Please-Vote’ messages at volume whilst driving around the area.  The crazy thing here is that having finally found the police they were tackling the only activists who I had seen campaigning legally!  To be fair to the constable the driver didn’t have insurance – but the irony still shouldn’t be lost.   After a quick chat with the officer she contacted her control room to find out who the police single-point-of-contact for the election was. Nobody in the control room knew.  She agreed she would pop round to the polling station herself, but didn’t seem to have had any briefing whatever about what is or is not acceptable (or legal) by activists so I’m unsure what good she would be able to do.

Now, in case you think “so long as activists are outside the gates then anything goes” you need to know that there are defined rules about what people are allowed to do in the vicinity of a polling station.  A ‘teller’ is allowed to stand near to the entrance and ask voters their polling card number only.  This allows the more organised parties who have canvassed to check if the people that said they would support them have actually voted.  Towards the end of the day a Party with a decent teller operation can then chase up all its supporters who haven’t yet voted and if necessary offer them lifts to the polling booths.  The Electoral Commission has brought all the rules about tellers together in Appendix E of this document here.   It is several thousand words, so to pull out just the salient bits:

“3.3 Tellers should not display or distribute election material (e.g. billboards, posters, placards or pamphlets) on walls or around the polling place.  [...]

[...]

3.5 Tellers must not attempt to induce, influence or persuade an elector how or whether to vote. Tellers cannot promote particular candidates or political parties. Their conduct must not give rise to allegations of undue influence, e.g. discussing voting intentions, party affiliations, a candidate’s history or party campaigns, or undertaking any other activity particularly associated with one particular party or candidate.”

Every time I showed activists these rules on May 6^th they looked at me like I was from another planet.

My afternoon tour brought more of the same across the constituency.  The day’s most serious incident was when I left a polling station in north Ladywood.  I’d had a chat with the activists at the gate and politely made them aware of the rules – prompting the charade of a temporary withdrawal until I was out of sight.  As I got back into my car a young women tapped on my window.  “Are you something to do with the election?”  She explained she had seen me having a word with the others, and assumed I was someone ‘official’.  She wanted me to know that the polling agents in the station had insisted that when her mother, who spoke only little English, went into the polling station they escorted her to the booth and filled the mothers ballot paper for her. I’ll not name the party accused as this is anecdotal.  She was livid; “It’s just not right.  Some of them are my family, man – but they stole my mother’s vote and it aint right.”   When I retold that tale to people who lived in the area they were unsurprised and told me the practice was widespread.   If true, one has to wonder the level of training given to Station Presiding Officers to allow this –  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised  – on the evidence of everything I had seen with my own eyes that day it is clear that very few of the people running our polling stations have even basic knowledge of what is and isn’t allowed.

The  answer to all the polling station issues  is to stop trying to police our elections on the cheap.  If our democracy matters – and I hope it does – then we should properly train the station presiding officers to run tighter ships within the station and have the Police available at the polling stations to quickly clamp down on any unacceptable behaviour outside.  I hope that the specific problems I saw were down to over-enthusiasm and ignorance by party activists rather than centrally co-ordinated misintent.  Regardless of whether it is cock-up or conspiracy being unable to guarantee our electorate can reach the ballot box without interference or pressure begins to chip away at the notion that our elections are ‘free and fair’.  The disregard for the rules must stop and only the Police have the clout to enforce them.  Even if putting a copper at every single polling station is unrealistic, we could still go a long way by prioritising the stations that have a history of issues – yes that means Ladywood would get far more Police attention – but if that is where the problem is, then this is where the solution is needed.

Let’s get onto postal votes.  This was where it went so wrong in 2004.  The good news here is that giant strides in the right direction have been made.  I was present at the electoral office when I saw a chap come in and try to register himself as a proxy for 16 postal votes – I’m pleased to report that he was politely but firmly told he could be proxy for no more than two unless they were immediate family.

At the postal count in Birmingham (which gets underway a week before polling day) there’s spawned a whole temporary industry checking every single ballot paper received to ensure that the envelope numbers and ballot paper numbers match –  all envelopes are passed through a scanner to check individual signatures and dates-of-birth against those held in the database.  Any which the computer software says may be suspect are removed for human adjudication.  I watched the adjudication and agreed with the call the official made every time.   This is a step forward – the old fraud where cheats would get themselves a copy of the ‘marked electoral register’ from the council to see who never votes and then send in false postal ballot papers from these apathetic voters is stopped by this system.  What the system will not stop is people from bullying or intimidating their family members or friends by demanding to inspect their postal ballot before they send it to ensure that “they have filled it in correctly”.   That is the downside of the postal voting – it needs to be balanced with the large number of people who work away from home in the week and for whom the availability of a postal vote stops them being disenfranchised.  The system isn’t perfect, but it now requires much greater effort and more willing co-conspirators if you wanted to pull off a major fraud.   I await the council to publish official figures but I would estimate from what I saw that about 10% of the postal votes received were rejected for various reasons.  It is sad to see how many people who went to the trouble of filling in the ballot paper then forget to sign the envelope and so waste their vote.

Back to the polling booths – One thing I did not observe myself, but is suggested to be widespread in the constituency is ‘personation’.  This is where someone simply claims to be someone else and votes on their behalf.  There is very, very little we can do about this as under current rules there is no power for the polling officials to demand any form of identification.   Obviously, an individual would be foolish to try and vote at the same station twice – but with scores of polling stations in each constituency, anyone who has seen the marked electoral register will know the names of people who usually do not vote.  It would not require great wit to do a tour of polling booths and vote scores of times.   An organised team could quickly wrack up hundreds of votes this way.  I make no claim that this happened in Ladywood in this election – I simply say that the lack of any system to prevent it allows rumours that it occurs to persist.

There is the well known saying that “opportunity creates the thief”.  So much of our electoral procedures are based on a very quaint British notion of trust.  British MPs showed in last year’s expenses debacle that even the supposedly honourable can be quick to take advantage of trust based systems.  Should we assume that there are no elements of the population who would take the opportunity to cheat if they could in the elections?  Of course not.  It is naive to assume it doesn’t go on.  Individual ballot boxes from certain stations in Ladywood apparently had turnout 20-30% higher than would have been expected.  This may be because a party had been incredibly successful in mustering the vote and a credit to them – or it may be that after the vote had closed an insider simply ticked off the remaining names on the register, filled in a whole load of ballot papers and stuffed the box.  We hope the former but we have too much trust and too few checks and balances to be certain.  Fraud could happen.

If all that wasn’t enough we also had one polling station at St Pauls Square which was so understaffed that around 100 people were denied the chance to vote at all despite having arrived in what should have been ample time, before the station closed at 10pm.  This was particularly irritating for our Party as it is one of the stations where we do well.  At least this incident has already attracted national media attention which prompted this report by the electoral commission here.

When you put everything together you do begin to imagine how an outside observer would view the proceedings.  As it happens there were some Observers present from Commonwealth countries across the UK.  The Kenyans were shocked that they see our ballot security as a lower standard than their own.  Well, they were looking at the orderly parts of the country – one wonders how much stronger their words would have been had they been in Ladywood.  Perhaps that is what is needed to raise our game?  It would be embarrassing to be lectured by Afghans or Iraqi’s on running a free and fair ballot – but if they observed what I observed they couldn’t objectively report faith in the result.

One thing I would stress is that for all the irregularities and potential for irregularities that I saw Shabana Mahmood’s majority is such that there is no doubt whatever in my mind that she was the rightful winner.  I’m confident she knew nothing of, and had no direct part in any dodgy activities by her activists.  Likewise her Lib Dem opponent.  I would also make no claim that there is any particular party worse than another in polling fraud or conduct.  Indeed I note that just up the road from me in Walsall three Tories have been charged with regards this election.

I would also not want to cast blame on Birmingham Council’s elections office.  They were courteous, professional and helpful throughout – they are constrained in scope by their minimal statutory powers and their available budget.

I have to say though that because of what I saw on May 6^th if the result had been anywhere near close I would not feel confident it could be trusted. That can’t be right.  This is the United Kingdom in 2010.  If we value our democracy we have to tighten up procedures and we have to better police our polling booths and the security of the ballot boxes from end-to-end of the process – I understand that there would be a cost involved – but when you think of those who have died for our democracy then protecting their legacy has to be worth it.

* You can read the background to the ‘banana republic quote from this report in the Times Newspaper here.

• Our voting system last week produced the farce of secret smoke-filled room deals where people horse trade this-bit-and-that-bit of their manifesto for a seat at the big boys’table.  This is vulgar, ‘undemocratic’and a betrayal of what people actually voted for.
• Therefore we need Proportional Representation to make it all ‘fair’and so that people can get what they voted for.

It is absurd that there are so many people who agree with both statements despite their obvious mutual contradiction.  If you think  closed-door horse-trading stinks you cannot  be in favour of PR.  Under PR you would have that farce after every single election.  The key difference would be that the likes of Nick Griffin would also be in the room getting concessions aligned with his agenda before anyone could get on and govern.  Aside from the BNP (with 11 seats)  being the most extreme example, other people who would be able to hold the nation to ransom (had last weeks voting been under PR) would be UKIP (17 seats)  and the Greens (5 seats)*

The current First-Past-The-Post system does have flaws.  People say that Tories only favour the system because it favours them – well, that’s not true – think on this:  Labour got 34% of the vote in 2005 and 356 seats – (and there was no national outrage in favour of PR then!).  Whereas last week the Conservatives got 36% of the Vote but only 306 seats.    Whilst Labour were able to comfortably hold a five-year term with their 34%, frankly we’ll do well to even get through a year with our 36%.  The system, as is, is significantly weighted in Labour’s favour.  So why do the Tories support it?

My instincts remain that running a country by committee of people who can’t stand each other is a recipe for gridlock and failure.  The principal of our current representative democracy is sound – each area votes for an individual, if that area thinks he did a rotten job they can vote him or her out at the end of each term.  The link between a member and a constituency is a valuable part of our democracy which we would be foolish to throw away.  However, I do accept that it is an uncomfortable fact that very, very few MPs will actually have got more than 50% of their vote locally.

The more I think about it the more  the answer seems to be to concede that the Alternative Vote (AV) may be the way to go.  Under this system every candidate elected would have had a positive vote from over 50% of voters in their constituency (albeit not necessarily as first preference – but the voter at least had the chance to express their ‘true’intention first – and then vote their next best option second knowing the second choice only counts if their first choice fails – it removes the need for ‘tactical’voting, keeps the principal of constituencies and every voter knows that their vote mattered.   This gives the MP confidence in their mandate.  We also need to do more work to even up the size of constituencies to stop the system being so weighted in favour of any one party.  This coming Parliament will give us a chance to do that.

For those still demanding PR  perhaps there is a compromise through which it can be accommodated in part.  The obvious solution is to have PR in the Lords.  If we are to move to an elected second chamber then in this arena PR makes more sense.  There is no link between representatives and constituencies to break in the Lords.  Appointments to the upper house have always been about patronage so it isn’t a particular step backwards that people placed at the top of party lists are guaranteed their seats.  The one downside is that as a nation we’ve been served well from both less ‘party-political’ tribalism in the Lords and the existence of members who are genuinely apolitical.  Perhaps this could be balanced by mixing the available Lords seats with the vast majority being elected through PR – but supplemented by ’apolitical’members appointed on behalf of of key institutions - for instance  Senior Judges, University Vice-Chancellors, Heads of Key UK Faiths, Ex-leaders of the armed forces,  Local Government Leaders,  Science (perhaps appointed by the Royal Society), Heads of Royal Colleges of Surgery, Nursing etc.   I’m not sure if the supplementary idea could fly – it’s just an idea – but however we constitute the second chamber it would be a shame if we did lose the diversity of expertise we currently enjoy.

One thing does look certain – we seem set for some level of constitutional reform.  Given the proposals look to be for AV then I may be at odds with my party position and actually get out there and campaign for it.  Thank goodness that, despite the noise, PR for the commons no longer looks like it is on the table.

(*figures of likely seats under PR taken from Glyn Ley’s Blog)