2011 and all that

I got to thinking about the 2011 AV referendum. Post-2016, it would be "the referendum we've all forgotten" if that title weren't held by the 2011 Welsh referendum. No, really, there was one - look it up on google, it's seven pages in.

I knew and know people who voted either way on AV, though my social circle was definitely skewed against the national trend (not surprising, I hang out with more lefties than righties) with a majority of people I knew backing AV whether eagerly or on the "half a loaf is better than no bread" basis.

Since 2011 we've had two general elections.  Who's profited from the outcome back in 2011?

A little digging found some figures from a fairly reliable source.

In 2015 - the one where David Cameron got a majority government with help from interesting sources like Unite and Unison - it didn't make much of a difference it seems.

ERS reckoned back then:

Party	Seats under AV	Difference from 2015 election seats
Conservative	337	+6
Labour	227	-5
SNP	54	-2
Liberal Democrats	9	+1
Plaid Cymru	3	–
UKIP	1	–
Greens	1	–

Two years later the skew went the other way and with a bigger margin:

ERS say:

Party	Seats under AV	Difference from 2017 election seats
Conservative	304	-13
Labour	286	+24
SNP	27	-8
Liberal Democrats	11	-1
Plaid Cymru	2	-2
UKIP	0	–
Greens	1	–

First, you notice that in a country where it's now nearly fifteen years since anyone won a working majority, AV still delivers one smallish-majority government followed by one almost impossible hung parliament.  For people wanting "strong and stable" government, well, we were jiggered under first past the post, we would be jiggered under AV.  All those scary stories of how AV would make small parties overly powerful have come unstuck in the age of Blukip.

Second - how frustrating is it that both times these figures only look at the 332 seats outside Northern Ireland. After years and years of STV elections there it's surely the easiest place to guesstimate where the transfers would go? But we'll have to put that to one side.

So if you're a Tory, AV would have made things a bit better at first but in 2017 would have probably made government impossible outside of a 'grand coalition'. Despite Con-Lab being the easiest coalition fit ideologically, the longstanding pretence of difference means it is incredibly unlikely outside of wartime. The Conservatives would be the biggest party but with the DUP not able to get them across that 323 line it's hard to imagine them getting the extra votes anywhere else. Lots of howling in the press if the biggest party doesn't get to form the government, sure, but to little avail.

Meanwhile if you are Labour it was a mild escape in the pummelling of 2015, but come 2017 you have perhaps missed out of kicking the Tories out of office and being in power, albeit needing a working arrangement with the SNP and the Liberals or the SNP and the DUP. 

Ironically for Liberals, whose first taste of coalition compromise was "well, it's only AV, and there'll be a referendum on it, but we've the furthest we'll have got with bringing about electoral reform in decades" there really hasn't been enough in it to matter, while for the SNP the "no" vote is an increasingly lucky escape.

And all told, for people who hate our current PM and voted who voted "no" eight years ago: she's only there thanks to you!

The Bedroom Tax: older than I thought!

I have to say that the Bedroom Tax is a bad thing - a bad, iniquitous, social engineering abomination of a thing - but also that it is misrepresented in many ways.

Firstly as being a LiberaTory coalition measure.  The phase of the bedroom tax being rolled out to all social housing tenants didn't happen til after the 2010 election, but even that had been announced back in 2008.

The earlier phase - which, like the one attracting faux outrage from Labour and their fellow travellers, was also a Labour initiative - was when it was rolled out in the private sector. As "Local Housing Allowance" it had a different branding and slightly different structure, but that's a factor of the different way that rent levels are negotiated in the private and social sector: Housing Association tenants can't haggle a couple of quid either way in their rent as it gets set at a given rate for a type of propert right across the whole of a given social landlord.

So I'd grant you that it was a "coalition measure", but a Co-Op/Labour coalition one, not a LiberaTory coalition policy.  Brown's majority was thin enough that it couldn't have happened without the Co-Operative Party lending Labour enough votes to get it into law: if you ever hear a Co-Operative MP rail against the bedroom tax, ask what they got in exchange for enabling it.

The cacophony of opposition to the 2010 phase compared to the silence in 2008 is notable. In part that is about how Labour's front organisations toe the party line, in part a reflection of how the social sector has as landlords funded organisations with staff and resources that can give a unified, co-ordinated voice, whereas hundreds of thousands of individual private tenants lack an equivalent. Our lackadaisical press leave awkward facts like this unmentioned.

But even before 2008 the first phase, perhaps we should call it phase zero, was the trialling of the basic idea.  That's from back when Gordon Brown was at the Treasury rather than in Number Ten, indeed it's even older than I thought it was. Some googling and I can trace it back to a remark from Malcolm Wicks, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, back on 19th December 2001, who explained in the House, "the under-occupation pilot encourages housing benefit recipients living in under-occupied social housing to move to smaller and cheaper accommodation in order to make more efficient use of housing stock".

That was about a successful pilot of the bedoom tax, so it must have started either just after the second 90s/00s Labour landslide or possibly even during the generally-not-that-bad 1997 government, which I tend to consider the second least bad government I've lived under. And just think: 2001, you could have had nine years of housebuilding to tackle the housing benefit bubble by 2010 if you'd wanted, and let supply and demand fix things.

Just when you think Labour are a bunch of Tories, they turn out to be a bunch of brazen spin-doctoring Tories instead.

Drop the DUP? What happens then?

As the Tories are all set to hook up with the DUP somehow, Labour's social media is kicking into overdrive about stopping it.  Write to your MP!  Tweet!  Post images on Facebook!

Er...

What happens then?

Because we've just had a general election and to get all Brenda from Bristol about it, since 2014 we've had at least two major bouts of voting almost everywhere each year between Euros, Generals, Council elections and the blasted Referendum.

We may have a hung parliament but we have no appetite for another poll.  And if we get another in 2017 on current form it'll be a hung parliament once more.  No-one really wants either of the big parties but most people are voting for the Least Bad Monster.

So mid-Brexit, at a time where a government able to do something could not be more critical, what are Labour actually proposing?

Assuming, you know, they are not just aiming to throw the country to the wolves saying, I'm alright Jack, sod the poor, let it be a chaotic Brexit with no viable plan or international trade deals and all the problems like rioting and starvation that will bring.

Are they proposing to form a government?

Because like the Tories they will need to get to 323 votes and you can only do that by working with the DUP, or forming a Grand Coalition of Tory & Labour together.

So - Labour readers, all of you who have retweeted or shared that DropTheDUP thing... are you looking to form a government with the Tories or one with the DUP? Or is your personal position "I'm alright Jack, sod the poor, let it be a chaotic Brexit with no viable plan or international trade deals and all the problems like rioting and starvation that will bring."

To break the bisexual code here - you gotta pick one.

28... years on

28 years ago today, Section 28 became law. It was not the first thing to make me pay attention to politics, but in the end it would be the biggest motivator in going from armchair to activism.

One of the joys of life today is that when you talk to young people, even politically informed queer young people, you have to explain what it was. Often this is followed by some incredulity that people thought such a thing was OK, let alone a popular vote-winner, just a few years ago. Yet David Cameron got elected into parliament through a campaign that included attacking the politically correct rascals on the other side with their wicked intentions to repeal the law.

Section 28 as it would be known, Section 2A as it more strictly became once law, and "the clause" in popular parlance at the time it was going through parliament, was an amendment to the 1986 Local Government Act, which said:

Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.

(1)The following section shall be inserted after section 2 of the Local Government Act 1986 (prohibition of political publicity)—

2A“ Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.

(1)A local authority shall not—

(a)intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;

(b)promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

(2)Nothing in subsection (1) above shall be taken to prohibit the doing of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease.

(3)In any proceedings in connection with the application of this section a court shall draw such inferences as to the intention of the local authority as may reasonably be drawn from the evidence before it.

(4)In subsection (1)(b) above “maintained school” means,—

(a)in England and Wales, a county school, voluntary school, nursery school or special school, within the meaning of the Education Act 1944; and

(b)in Scotland, a public school, nursery school or special school, within the meaning of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980.”

(2)This section shall come into force at the end of the period of two months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.

In practice and in intent, Section 28 made homosexuality a thought crime, an act which Russia is busy proving to us was not solely possible off the back of 1980s HIV hysteria, though back in the 80s that probably helped. Despite the "homo" wording it was a bi and trans issue too, as there was such a deep lack of grasp of LGBT in the public consciousness back then.

It was a vague law - I remember hearing one Tory MP defend it to an LGBT audience claiming that as it was so poorly worded it didn't mean anything and therefore couldn't be homophobic in effect and did no harm. Fair play, if you're going to lie, make it a big one.

Actually the looseness of the language meant that it could be argued to prevent anything homophobes in positions of power wanted to stop happening. I saw it used to block information for schoolkids who wanted to know their human rights, to bar newspapers appearing in libraries, and to silence those who wanted to support people struggling with their gender or sexuality.  Even where there was support for gay people, it was used as an excuse to defend biphobia (to paraphrase but not by much, "section 28 means we can't give help or recognition to bi people, as that would encourage straight people to become gay")


It was a populist backbench Conservative bill introduced with Labour support, leaving only the Lib Dems on the other side of the argument. The Lib Dems had slightly more MPs than they do now but were still helplessly outnumbered. Knowing it was unlikely to be stopped outright, Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes brought forward changes that would have watered the measure down, but they lacked support beyond his own party. Labour's grassroots members started pressing their party's MPs to change tack and oppose the measure, but that took some time: and even if they could be persuaded, Margaret Thatcher was sitting on a majority of 100.

And so on May 24th, 1988 it became law.  It was the post-1967 nadir of LGBT equalities in the UK, adding to a litany of inequalities: employment, age of consent, adoption, partnership recognition, pensions, housing and so on.


But it had a galvanising effect on the LGBT community, not least by giving lesbians and gay men a common cause to fight around. Like the baddy in any story, the politically active queer organisations and individuals it spawned would bring about its own downfall, and spur momentum toward the near-equality we have for LGBT people with straight cisgender people today. 


It should have been gone in 1997 when the Tories left power, as the new government had pledged to a tight spending programme but here was something positive for society that could be done at no cost. Alas Labour chose not to include repeal of Section 28 in their manifesto.  In the great tension of "what is right to do" versus "what will upset the Sun and the Daily Mail", they decided that keeping the tabloids on side was more important than childrens' lives. That meant repeal had to wait until the 2001-2005 parliament as the pro-prejudice majority in the Lords blocked repeal. As it wasn't in the manifesto, Labour felt they couldn't overrule the Lords on the subject.

It went in Scotland in 2000 though - one of the prices of coalition the Lib Dems extracted from Labour at Holyrood; in England and Wales it would stick around until 2003.

I was a teenager in 1988, and though I had newspaper cuttings about the clause on my bedroom wall I no longer remember the day the clause became law. I remember the day it went though; for a little while I thought: we have won, it is ended, I can stop fighting now. Then the next day dawned and there was still far too much wrong in the world to rest just yet.

De Montfort makes eyes at Dave

De Montfort University* has got in a kerfuffle after awarding its highest honour to David Cameron in recognition of the importance of same-sex marriage and its impact in social progress.

There's a petition here which has that rare quality of being an online petition I can entirely sign up to the sentiments of despite not having written. Far too many throw in peculiar delusions along the way.

How I feel about it all though is a little complicated. 

 

Dave was sticking his neck out in backing the marriage bill: it cost him support within his party (who were divided 50-50 on it in Parliament in the end: slightly against in the Commons and slightly in favour in the Lords) and it surely handed Tory votes to UKIP without which he'd now be sitting on a much more comfortable majority. That does deserve some recognition, though it's sad to say that we live in an era where politicians who spend their political capital on doing something of benefit to others deserves special credit. 25 years earlier if such a law had been enacted his party would have been promising to repeal same-sex marriage the moment they got in. Now it's something they boast, somewhat misleadingly, of having done, and so we can feel more secure of it staying law regardless who runs the country in the years to come. As someone who wants liberation and equality, getting the Tories to 'buy in' to same-sex marriage is a definite plus.

But the bill came not from Dave but from Lynne Featherstone, following the resolution at Lib Dem conference proposed by the party's LGBT+ wing and opposed by Stonewall. As the Liberals have been on the right side of every LGBT rights question since forever on account of their ideology, often on their own, that is seen as a less bold move.

I feel parallels in how I've seen for example Unison's LGBT wing getting praise for bisexual engagement work. Which they have been doing well over the last five years or so and I've been glad to see. Yet my work's LGBT network was pulling in bi activists to do equivalent engagement work in the 90s when LG Unison were telling bisexuals to get stuffed. It's a bit galling for people who did heavy lifting long ago, when it's the comparative latecomers to the party get the praise...

Which is a roundabout way of saying I'd have a lot more time for De Montfort if they'd been giving similar recognition to Lynne and e.g. one of the early pioneers who got us here like Bernard Greaves. 

 

That'd feel like celebrating the change rather than buttering up the PM.

 

 

 

* - me neither. Turns out it's in Leicester

What We Have And Why

How the Unions handed the Tories power

In 2010, when the dust from the election settled, the Tories were fewer than 20 seats away from taking power. Labour, on the other hand, were around 70 seats away from the same goal - four times as far. 326 is the magic number in the Commons, and the Tories were on 307 while Labour were on 258.

At this point, the Trades Unions and Labour made a conscious decision that not only would they stay in opposition for the 2010-2015 parliament, but that they wanted to throw the next election - or even the next couple of elections.

To have the next government be Labour rather than Tory, whatever they did during the 2010 parliament had to shift power toward Labour four times as fast as it shifted it toward the Tories.  Gain 20 seats for each of Red and Blue and the Tories would be in power with a slender majority. Gain no more than 17 for the Tories but 68 for Labour and you could, just, overtake them and get the keys to Number 10.

Yet they aimed their campaigns at demonising and demolishing the Liberals, and ousting Liberal MPs from Parliament.  The trouble with this strategy being that of the 57 Liberal MPs around four out of five held seats that would otherwise go Tory.  For each seat where the Liberals were punished for the coalition by losing to their local challenger, the Tories were moved toward power four times as fast as were Labour: the very opposite of what was needed to give Labour a chance at government.

Events exacerbated this with the rise of UKIP and the SNP taking ground from behind Labour while on their intended battlefront they were actively handing seats to the Tories, but that plot twist was yet to come.

This is not to say I don't understand why Labour and their wealthy owners in Unite, Unison et al did it.  The coalition gave them three possible sets of targets to aim at.  They could aim their fire at both Liberal and Conservative groups; or at either one.

Aiming at the Tories was their default position, but might allow the Liberals to underline the measures they were blocking thanks to the hung parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Coalition all agreed on cuts of around £80bn; pointing out that the Tories on their own wanted to slash £96bn instead would highlight the positive impact voting Liberal had.

Aiming at the coalition as a whole would open Labour up to charges of hypocrisy, as most of the things the coalition was doing that were unpopular were Labour's own ideas. The extension of the Bedroom Tax, hiking up Tuition Fees, ending EMA, giving ATOS huge power over the lives of disabled people, curbing public spending by £80bn... these were all in the existing Labour plan - so whilst criticising them would be populist, it would also ring hollow if the media paid attention.  Where the coalition differed from the Labour plan - levying higher taxes on the best paid, taking the poorest paid out of paying income tax - attacking that was not a message that would play well to Labour's core vote.  Worse yet, the rate of privatisation of the NHS had fallen under the Coalition compared to what it had been under Gordon Brown.

So there was the third option, to blame the coalition on the Liberals and focus fire on them. A really emotionally tempting opportunity - after years of the Liberals attacking Labour from the left, pretend that everything the Coalition did was the will of the Liberals rather than the result of compromising between Liberal and Tory positions, five parts Tory to every one part Liberal. It gave a fine sense of revenge for the way the Liberals had taken Labour apart over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, creating massive youth unemployment since the early 00s, flogging off the NHS, blocking LGBT rights measures and so forth.

But the quid pro quo for that sense of vengeful satisfaction was consciously choosing to give the Tories absolute power. The gains Labour made would be outstripped four-to-one and the sixty seat advantage the Tories had would only increase.  Of course, the SNP then made the maths even worse, stripping out a slew of seats Labour had taken for granted as safely their own.

So why do we have a Tory government?  Five years ago the trades unions decided to give us one, and Labour collaborated in delivering it.

Majority Rule

So here's... fun... as we watch the formation of a single-party government for the first time since 1992. After the claims from vested interests that Clegg got nothing out of the Tories but a seat in a ministerial limo, let's see what difference the Liberals were making. My money's on "rather more than the junior partner in the previous coalition".

(More immediately, a terrible night for those of us on the left, with one of the two UK left parties wiped out and the other falling back badly, but that's going to be very well covered elsewhere - along with the fact that for the first time in my life the 'Blukip' parties won a majority of the overall vote, which will put the lie to any claims that Cameron lacks a mandate for a sweeping cuts agenda).

More Out MPs in 2015?

It was pleasing to read research that suggests we may have more LGBT MPs in the coming parliament than the old one.  I'd been worrying the academics were all busy and I was going to have to do the maths myself.

The 2010 parliament had 27 out LGB members - 13 Conservative (4% of their parliamentary party), 9 Labour (3%), 4 Lib Dem (7%) and 1 Plaid Cymru (33%).  Of these, two were bi men (one Lib Dem, one Tory) and two gay women (one Tory, one Labour): the remaining 22 gay men.  In the interests of multi-party balance I should add that the DUP are probably most emphatic that none of the 26 are theirs.

27 is a significant slice of the 36 out bi or gay MPs we've ever had. If you were ever an out-LGB MP, the chances are you still are one. There haven't been any openly trans MPs in the UK yet, and though there are trans candidates for most of the mainland parties - indeed one of them currently being splashed over the papers as trans, queer and poly - alas none look likely to break through.  Sorry Zoe.

For all that the polls suggest another hung parliament, they also suggest one with a swing to the right: we will have a different bunch of MPs running the show. It looks like fewer Lib Dem MPs and more SNP members, and a huge switcharound of Labour MPs as they lose a swathe of seats in Scotland and gain others in England. Probably quite some turnover of Tory MPs too.

All sides, pretty much, have out candidates. There are 38 for the Liberal Democrats, 35 Labour, 28 Tory, 22 Green, 5 UKIP, 3 Plaid Cymru, 1 SNP and 1 Alliance.  The latter three parties only stand in 40, 59 and 18 seats respectively.

That said, in UK elections most candidates don't get elected. There's not many openly-LGBT potential new MPs in Tory-gain or SNP-gain type seats, but there are a few in Labour-gain seats. If the polls turn around for the Lib Dems, the seats they'd gain would add a little to the tally too. So we can look forward to fresh queer faces on the green benches after May 7th.

To keep bisexual geeks on their toes, both existing seats with bi MPs - and the one that might gain a new out bi MP - are seats that might change hands.  The Conservative seat of Shrewsbury and Atcham has been in blue, gold and red columns in the last fifteen years, while the Liberal seat of Southwark and Old Bermondsey has been a Labour target at every election since 1983. Labour hope to gain Stockton South: on current polls they should do as it's a very Labour seat that flipped blue in 2010.

Coalition, please

Doing the bisexual community info outreach stall in Sheffield last weekend, one of the conversations I had with quite a few stall visitors was about the Bisexuality Report. What was it; why it was useful; how it came about.

Each time I started along the lines of, "think back to 2010 after the Coalition Government was formed? One of the good things was, because it was a formal coalition, they laid out on paper what they were going to do. On LGBT issues there was an LGB&T Action Plan. It was incredibly helpful for people outside Westminster, outside the well-funded London clique groups like Stonewall. Because now we knew broadly what to expect and when, so we knew: this thing should come up next May, we have time to prepare and know what to look for, and what to chase up on if it doesn't seem to be happening." That then led onto talking about how the LGB&T Action Plan lacked a bi strand and evidence base, which gave momentum to the "Bi Life 2" idea and led to my proposal for the Bisexuality Report in 2011.

Having a coalition government meant a written plan with a timeline both parties had broadly signed up to.  Prior to 2010 there was never that kind of open agenda: to know what was going to happen next you had to be part of the Westminster bubble. You had to already be in the clique in order to influence the clique. Here instead was an open plan for all to follow.

Of course it hasn't meant that as grassroots community group organising types we magically have gained offices, staff and so on. But within what unfunded projects can do it has been massively better.

Which parties are involved in the next government will affect what winds up in any new five year agenda for action, but from the perspective of the less cash-heavy end of the third sector, I do hope it's a coalition. That way we all have more chance of engagement with what happens from here to 2020.