Three reasons for Scotland to vote YES! (Warning - content may disturb)

In a last ditch effort to save / destroy the union, Westminster has sent Cameron, Clegg and Milliband - all English -  on a desperate mission to persuade Scots that they are not dominated, patronised and bossed about by the English.

Is Charles Kennedy sober yet?

The Lib Dems might need him:

The electoral oblivion apparently confronting the Liberal Democrats as led by Nick Clegg was underscored on Monday by leaked opinion polls in four seats showing that the party will be wiped out. 

Commissioned by a Lib Dem supporter from ICM and subsequently passed to the Guardian, the polling indicates that the Lib Dem leader would forfeit his own Sheffield Hallam constituency at the next election. 

The party would also lose its seats in Cambridge, Redcar and Wells, costing MPs Julian Huppert, Ian Swales and Tessa Munt Westminster seats. 

If the business secretary, Vince Cable, were to take over as leader, the Lib Dems would perform marginally better, the data suggests. Appointing Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, would give the party a more modest boost. 

The damning verdict comes after a crestfallen and visibly exhausted Clegg said in the early afternoon that he would not buckle in the face of woeful European election results which cost the party 10 of its 11 MEPs and left it in fifth place. 

Ukip topped the polls – winning 23 MEPs – leaving huge questions for all three mainstream parties, but especially for Clegg's strategy of confronting the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, in two TV debates that he was deemed to have lost.

 Link

I'm not really in favour of leaders resigning over rather trivial mid term elections, nor do I like parties reneging on agreements. But the Lib Dems really are in dire trouble and I think Clegg might need to resign, and the contest needs to be not just about a new leader but the future of the coalition agreement.

I'd suggest the new leader should run on a 'quickie divorce' agreement but on the explicit understanding that they will 'endeavour' to allow the Tories to continue a minority administration until the pre-agreed dissolution (Cameron can not dissolve parliament to suit himself).

This would get the Lib Dems out of a toxic arrangement but not leave them looking like wreckers - but in the powerful position where the Tories have to come to them for support.

It will also hurt the Tories, which is obviously a good thing. Though it might also hurt Labour, as a couple of percentage points of Lib Dem defectors return home.

Fundamentalist wreckers in the English education system

There's been a lot of ink spilled by the Daily Mail about supposed fundamentalist Muslims trying to take control of English schools.

As part of a rather unIslamic sounding operation called 'Trojan Horse,' they are trying (Shock! Horror!) avail themselves of the powers and rights to influence school governance that are available to everyone and make sure (again, Shock! Horror!) make sure the schools reflect the character of the communities they serve.

 It is worth noting that English state schools are not secular. They should be, but they aren't. There is actually a legal requirement that religion is part of the school - collective worship and religious education are mandated. It isn't 'learning about religions' - otherwise there wouldn't be a option for parents to withdraw children.

The story does has some worrying aspects, though the whole thing I suspect is grossly exaggerated - it is the Daily Mail, after all. Much, as I said, has been made of this by the Mail and the gibbering hate press, in between the unending stream of articles about 'halal' slaughter.

Meanwhile, a fanatic has successfully infiltrated the education system, at the highest level, and is causing havoc. he is twisting and perverting the education system, re-allocating money to fund his pet projects at the expense of mainstream schools that do not fit his blinkered vision of what good education 'looks like.'

The fanatic is called Michael Gove.

In a dramatic escalation of tensions, the Lib Dems confirmed highly damaging leaked information from a senior government source, who said that Gove had secretly taken the money from the Basic Need fund for local authorities last December, in the face of stiff opposition from the Lib Dem schools minister David Laws. 

The Basic Need budget is given to local authorities to ensure that they can provide sufficient school places for all children in their area and it is crucial when there is heavy pressure on pupil numbers. 

The government source behind the revelations tore into Gove, describing him as a "zealot … so ideologically obsessed with his free school experiment [that] he's willing to see children struggle to get suitable school places". 

This was done, said the source, because Gove had let the free school budget spin "out of control". 

Last month this newspaper revealed a secret plan to focus support on failing free schools because of the "political ramifications of any more free schools being judged inadequate".

A sickening, hateful monster, trying to twist the education system because of a warped, nasty idea of how things should be.

The Mail doesn't seem to worried about it, of course.

My own frothing aside, this latest spat between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems does raise the (inevitable) question of how the coalition is going to end.

 The Lib Dems have made massive efforts to support the Conservatives, and have seen their ratings decline to single figures as a result. Nick Clegg was regarded as the future of politics once, remember? 

The Lib Dems will have to 'uncouple' at some point before the election. It would be really stupid of them to go in still propping up the Tories.

Why not now?

A year of 'constructive opposition,' supporting the government on confidence votes and supply votes, would allow the hatred to subside and let the party re-establish some sort of non-coalition identity, and also show how an alternative formal coalitions would work.

Cameron, of course, can not dissolve parliament and call an election - he gave up that power in 2010 in one of the few genuinely good things this government has done. Parliament remains, even if the coalition splits, or even if the government loses a confidence vote.

I doubt the Lib Dems would actually want to topple the Conservative government. They'd prefer to let it limp on as a minority administration, depending on the Lib Dems or minor parties for continual support, tormented by the MPs it relies on to survive from day to day.

But they could. So there's a possibility of UnEleKTUD EdD getting into Downing Street before any one votes for him!

Miliband Miliband Miliband

Looking at this whole miserable mess in a detached manner, it's actually been very good for Miliband (Ed edition - see what I did there?).  He's managed to completely trump the Toery party conference, and build on a robust, crowd-and-voter-pleasing speech at his own shindig.  Best of all, he's been able to do it without seeming to be trying to do it.  If he'd loudly announced free jam for every one just as Cameron took the stage, he'd have looked like a cynical opportunist and people would - quite rightly - have asked why he hadn't bothered to mention this during his own conference.

And he's been attacked - through his dead war veteran dad - by the Daily Mail, so he can only look good as a result, the way we tend to not condemn Stalin as much as we should because he was on the side of decency against Hitler.  Anyone been excoriated by the Daily Mail probably deserves the benefit of the doubt - Mark Duggan and Stephen Lawrence's killers being the exceptions that prove the rule.

Miliband has had a chance to look tough and forthright, and has managed to not sound whiny about this.  He's been angry, but not self-pitying.  He's managed to link the mess to a wider narrative - the nastiness and unscrupulousness of some parts of the press, and the concentration of media in the hands of a few self-interested rightwing moguls.  And he's won sympathy from the sort of people who start sentences by saying, "I've been a lifelong Tory voter ..."

Even better, his rivals have been flat-footed.  Cameron and the other Tory heavyweights have been silent, making them seem to be endorsing the Mail's repugnant behaviour.  Nick Clegg is the only senior member of the coalition to unequivocally condemn the Mail.  True, some of the old sticks have spoken out from the comparative safety of the Lords - but as Polly Toynbee points out, it is easy to risk your political career when it is essentially over.

As for the Mail, it has been a disastrous misjudgement. They've made Miliband far more human and likeable than he was a week ago, raised his profile immensely, made themselves look truly hateful and unintentionally demonstrated why we need to reform and strengthen the way the British press is regulated.

What were they thinking?

Lords Reform

Yes, I know, it's very relevant to the lives of the Common Man, especially the Common Man of New Zealand.  As Tim Black notes - sarcastically - over on Spiked:

The excitement is difficult to miss. There’s a buzz, a democratic fizz in the air. In pubs and bars, community ‘hubs’ and shopping centres, people just can’t stop talking about it. That ‘it’ is, of course, the very real possibility that the UK will have a mainly elected House of Lords. I feel electrified just typing those words, ‘mainly elected’.

Yes, so it's totally dull and mostly irrelevant political deckchair work.  The Ship of State may have had her run in with the iceberg, but things can only get better if the passengers can sit over there.

Still, I must admit that I do feel a bit electrified at the idea of Lords reform.  I'm the sort of person to whom this sort of person in whom this sort of abstruse political stuff does provoke a mild degree of interest.  Which is probably why I'm stuck here pecking away at the internet (with a worryingly high readership in Norway, according to Blogger stats) when I should be doing something much more fun, or at least pulling up the epic weeds that have seized control of the garden.

Lords reform is the British Wimbledon Hopes of politics.  There is continual interest in it among a very small group of people, but nothing ever comes of it.  Just like Andy Murray briefly made it seem possible that a Brit might actually win the bloody trophy, so do we experience brief moments when it seems the House of Lords might finally be junked.  But nothing much ever comes of it, and nothing much will come of it this time.  If Tony Blair couldn't do very much in 1997, with a majority of about 10 million and a (short lived) genuine interest in reform, I predict a half-hearted effort, driven by the (doomed) minor party in a Conservative dominated coalition, seeking to achieve nothing much, will also fail.  And so it should.

I say the above not because I have suddenly become remorselessly Tory, but because the current reforms are almost as witless as the House of Lords as it is currently constituted.  The problem with the Housel of Lords is not that it is unelected: the problem is that it is superfluous, anachronistic and irrelevant; it has few real powers; it is crammed with cronies who buy their titles or get moved on up after undistinguished careers in the Commons (take a bow, Lord Prescott).

In answer to this, the hapless (doomed) Nick Clegg proposes a 'mainly elected' House, failing to see how utterly uninteresting this prospect is to people at large.  Even people such as I can not get very excited at voting for members of the second chamber.  It's another bloody imposition and waste of time, frankly.  Don't we vote people in to office to take care of this sort of stuff for us?  We don't mind the taxes - we expect that - but when they come whining to us demanding further efforts on our part to 'legitimise' their actions, it becomes a right bloody chore.

House of Lords reform is essential.  That much is obvious to everyone with a brain.  The Clegg reforms are also idiotic.  That much should also be obvious to everyone with a brain.  I see no need for a directly elected upper chamber.  We elect the Commons directly, and power should.  Putting in yet more elections for yet more bodies only dilutes the importance of the elections to the Commons.  All central government power should stem from there, not from a bunch of secondary elections.  No-one, bluntly, other than tragic political spods such as myself, will care enough about voting for the second chamber to make an informed choice about it; the reforms proposed would only reproduce the current irrelevant, disconnected nature of the Lords, under a patina of democratic legitimacy.

Let the Commons sort out the House of Lords.  Make it an appointed, smaller chamber, with some genuine powers, say 400 members, made up of representatives chosen by the parties in the Commons (plus some other supplementary members, like legal experts, philosophers and scientists).  Members hold their seat for 10 years, staggered so that ten percent are replaced every year.  Replacements are allocated based on representation in the Commons; so if you hold forty per cent of the seats in the Commons, you get forty per cent of the new appointees to the Lords.  This way, a democratic link is maintained, but the second chamber is insulated against the extremism of results like 1945, 1983 and 1997.  And they can still call themselves the Lords, and retain their fancy titles and so on, because I actually quite like all that historical stuff, and only Year Zero mentalists think democratic, socialist reform means doing away with tradition and history.

It can be that simple.  Only Clegg seems to have become obsessed with the need to get something, somewhere, elected through proportional representation.  Having been stymied by his coalition partners in the attempt to change the Commons voting system, his seizing this consolatory bone from Cameron's - the chance to reform something that isn't important and isn't going to be powerful, and thus doesn't need to exist at all.  What a sorry sight this is!