Odds and Sods

It’s been a quiet week on the blog. I’m still not over a cold which has transmogrified into an ear infection, and Fairer Votes campaigning is taking up more and more of my time. This weekend I plan a mammoth blog-writing session, but for now here’s a few things I’ve found interesting.

1. I’ve been reading The J-Curve by Ian Bremmer, which is brilliant. More on that at a later date. For now, I want to share with you a fact I found when reading it. 

In 2005 China launched its version of American Idol. It was called the “Mengniu Yoghurt Super Girl Contest”, apparently after the brand of yoghurt that sponsored the show.

What a fantastic name for a show! I don’t know about you, but I feel a much happier, more fulfilled person for knowing that fact.

2. David Cameron was asked on the One Show “how do you sleep at night”?

It’s brilliant telly. The gasp from Alex Jones, and the fact you can see her hands on head reflected behind Cameron, is great entertainment. Her expression clearly distracted Cameron from answering the question too. Marvellous.

3. An MP played air guitar in the Commons this week.

Apparently it’s all the Labour Party’s fault.

“I think this shows Labour’s lack of substance on defence these days, if their only line of attack is about the subconscious finger tapping of a backbench MP,” said Mr Evans.

It was just “subconscious finger tapping” apparently.

4. I’m slightly addicted to this song:

5. Also there is news on what disgraced former MP (gosh it feels good to write that) Phil Woolas is doing now. He’s written a chapter in “The Prime Ministers Who Never Were”, due out soon, about J.R. Clynes.

Secondly, there’s this from Monday:

[L]ast week, Mr Woolas was spotted outside a Westminster pub.

Eagle-eyed Richard Kemp, leader of the Liberal Democrat Group at the Local Government Association and Inside Housing columnist, said: ‘The last time I saw Phil, he was standing outside a bar with a fag hanging out of his mouth and a pint in his hand, and today I saw him with a fag hanging out of his mouth and a pint in his hand and I thought I’d find out what on earth he was up to’.

The answer? Apparently Mr Woolas is selling feed-in tariffs to councils and social landlords. However, no renewable energy firm has seen fit to list him on their website, and he wasn’t contactable to discuss his new job. Odd, that.

So now you know.

Old and Sad: Goodbye to all that

This is my final blog on the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. I’m looking forward to moving on from it, and blogging about other topics. In my notebook I have 14 (!) blog posts in various stages of stages of completion, as well as about half a dozen more I want to write and haven’t got round to starting yet. Now When the bloody thesis is written I can finish some of these.

In this post I just want to give a few worthy plugs and say a few quick thank-yous, which I hope will not stray into the self-indulgent territorry.

But first…

My earlier post was long enough without discussing the votes received by the other parties in last night’s result, but I think they merit a quick mention. The BNP lost their deposit, lost 1000 votes from May and came fifth behind UKIP, which can only be A Good Thing. For their part, UKIP gained 300 votes from their May performance, with most disgruntled Tories seemingly voting Lib Dem or staying at home.

In Labour/Lib Dem marginals the votes of the other left-wing parties are always going to be squeezed, and it proved the case yesterday for the Greens and the Pirate Party.

And now…

The first of our thanks and plugs I should give a quick mention to Loz Kaye and the Pirate Party. Loz seems a very decent chap, and the head of a party with an interesting set of issues. I hope we hear more from Loz and the Pirates over the coming years.

Richard Jones at the Saddleworth News deserves a massive pat on the back for his incredible by-election coverage. Anyone he did not interview was probably not worth interviewing, and for a one-man-band his workrate was exceptional. His daughter also become a minor celebrity in the course of the campaign.

Also, thanks to those who wrote the online hustings posts: four candidates, Jonathan Arnott as well as guest-bloggers Paul Cotterill, Simon Turner and Nick Thornsby. They were all interesting and informative, and popular to boot, so thank you all.

As always with political issues, discussions on Twitter are never dull. Andrea, Nick Watts and Ian Barker are three of the many tweeters who made discussing #oes very fun indeed. 

Of course, there is one final goodbye:

 Now that the by-election is over, it’s the official end of the Phil Woolas saga. No more stirring up of racial tensions, no more getting the white vote angry, no more seeing him on TV, no more of, well, all the horrible things he did and said.

Sadly, it won’t be an end to friends mentioning “Phil Woolas” to me merely to provoke a reaction, but I’m learning to cope with that thanks to numerous, extensive sessions with a whole battalion of therapists.

I’m now going to go with the pub, discuss the by-election a bit more, and then never write about Phil Woolas again. And I can’t tell you how good that feels.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Old and Sad: Labour hold; Lib Dem disaster

So, at the end of all that, it’s a Labour hold. It feels like an anti-climactical end to a roller-coaster of an eight months for the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency. We’ve had one of the bitterest general election campaigns fought in recent years, two recounts, a wafer-thin majority, a court case, an MP leaving in disgrace and, according to the Independent, “the most unusual by-election ever“.

Now Debbie Abrahams has been elected as the Labour MP (full results here), the area should return to some sort of normality until 2015, the most likely date for the general election. I doubt anyone living in Oldham East wants to see any election leaflet until then; everyone is suffering from election fatigue.

I’ve been saying on Twitter and Facebook (and to anyone who would listen) that Labour would hold Oldham East for about the past week or two. This has hardly involved sticking my neck out much, though. Ever since the polls showed that Labour were 17 points ahead on Sunday, the result has felt a bit of a formality.

In May, 14,186 people voted for the Devil Incarnate with a Labour rosette attached to it. The Labour vote would only have gone up since then, given their boost in the polls. In contrast, the Lib Dem vote of 14,083 would only have gone down, despite a significant amount of tactical voting from the Tories.

To win this by-election, the Lib Dems were relying on two factors. Firstly, that the personal vote that Elwyn Watkins had developed would over-ride his party’s current chronic unpopularity. Second, that people voted Lib Dem out of a sense of injustice and outrage over Phil Woolas’s leaflets. Both these factors turned out to be insufficient.

The Woolas shenanigans has not been a factor in the campaign. Both Debbie Abrahams and Kashif Ali have said that it just was not a doorstep issue. I’ve mentioned before that it was a big issue for me, but it really isn’t that surprising that most residents of Oldham East and Saddleworth don’t care much about it. After all, we have the biggest cuts to public spending in living memory coming up. That’s a much bigger issue then who-said-what in an election leaflet eight months ago, and I say this as someone who thinks that the Woolas case is, to paraphrase Joe Biden, a pretty big deal. The fact that anger over cuts seems to have caused people to vote Labour, who would have made the majority of these cuts had they been in power anyway, seems to be by-the-by.

The big story here: disaster for the Lib Dems

Let nobody try and persuade you otherwise: this is a terrible result for the Lib Dems.

Saddleworth is, as one of their main organisers in Oldham put it to me, “the kind of area where people vote Lib Dem because their parents do”. That kind of area is thin on the ground. It was also a by-election, where the Lib Dems generally excel, in a constituency where they only finished 103 votes behind Labour in May. They had a reasonably popular local candidate, hundreds of activists on the ground, and Nick Clegg visited Oldham three times. Not to mention the fact that their campaign had a head start of both Labour and the Tories, and they also moved a writ to hold the by-election as early as possible.

Nick Thornsby has been admirably trying some damage-limitation. He said last night:

A Labour majority of 3,558 is less than Phil Woolas achieved in 2005, when the seat was identified as a target by the Liberal Democrats – not an outstanding result for them by any means.

Ah yes, 2005. When the Lib Dem candidate was Tony Dawson, who screwed up his party’s chances of gaining a winnable target seat by, as I recall:

a) Claiming he lived in the constituency when he actually lived in Southport
b) Being accused of doctoring photos on election literature
c) Making obscene comments on internet forums

You could hardly claim, then, that 2005 was a high water mark in Lib Dem support.

The other argument against a Lib Dem collapse is the fact that their share of the vote actually increased. However, this rose from 31.63% in May to the heady heights of, er, 31.9% yesterday. The number of Lib Dem votes actually fell by almost 3000, and would have fallen by much more were it not for tactical voting from some Conservatives. UK Polling Report reckon that at least 22% of Tory voters switched to the Lib Dems. Most of the other Lib Dem voters, it seems, just did not turn up at all.

The Lib Dems really believed they could win this by-election; for them not to makes you wonder where they can win at all now.

The strange collapse of the Tory vote

Baroness Warsi has been on the radio talking about how effective the Tory campaign was, despite losing 6500 votes from May. In some respects, Warsi was the perfect choice from the Conservatives to front the by-election campaign. On the one hand, she is a senior Tory (party chair, no less), Northern, Asian, and therefore could connect to the large Asian vote. On the other hand, she is completely incompetent and a liability. For an election where the Tories didn’t really want to win, but wanted to pretend that they did, Warsi was the perfect choice.

In any other situation where the Tories finished 2,500 votes behind Labour, there would have been a massive Tory campaign to win the seat in a subsequent by-election, and potentially destablise Ed Miliband’s leadership. Arif Ansari, the BBC’s political editor in the Northwest, made the point last night that whilst the Lib Dems and Labour were constantly telling him what events they were planning and who was coming to the constituency, he was having to chase the Tories to work out what was going on with their campaign. Then, when David Cameron did campaign in the constituency, he forgot the candidate’s name.

This blog from Guido Fawkes gives some of the reasons Tory activists were grumbling about their by-election campaign. It inclues this briefing note that was given in the last week of the campaign:

Suggesting they hadn’t updated their briefing notes since November. Nice one.

Still, we probably cannot read too much into this result. It’s been a Labour seat since 1997, governing parties don’t usually win by-elections, and there’s a long way to go until the next election. However, we do know now what the political narrative of the next year will be: the crumbling Lib Dem vote.

Thoughts on Old and Sad (or: I’m so vain I probably think this by-election is about me)

It’s very unusual for my home town to be the centre of anything, so I have loved keeping tabs on the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election campaign. Voting in that takes place on January 13th, one week from today.

The first by-election in any Parliament is always intriguing. Add the fact that we have a coalition government into the mix, as well as the exceptional circumstances in Oldham, and we have a perfect storm for political junkies like myself.

Not only is this by-election crucial for all three main parties, but it will also play a major role in determining the media narrative for 2011. Will the focus be on the crumbling Lib Dem vote? Or the stability – or otherwise – of the coalition? Maybe on Ed Miliband’s ineffective leadership? Perhaps the focus will be on disenchantment with the three main parties, as smaller parties see an increase in their vote.

As you’d expect, it’s a crowded field with ten candidates. We’ll be hearing from most of them next week in Paperback Rioter’s online hustings (check this blog out on Sunday for more information on that).

I even got the chance to speak to one last week, when Debbie Abrahams, the Labour candidate, canvassed our house. I gave her my best Paxman-style grilling; the impact of which was probably diminished by the fact that I was wearing my pyjamas and dressing gown at the time.

Debbie Abrahams was Head of Rochdale PCT but resigned over increasing privatisation. She also said to me that she was in favour of AV (“a step in the right direction”). Also, she is married to John Abrahams, a former Lancashire captain and current England under-19 coach. On the face of it, she is probably my dream Labour Candidate.

We talked for a bit about the cuts, and Debbie Abrahams reiterated Labour’s plans to halve the deficit in four years, as opposed to the three years set out by the Government in the Comprehensive Spending Review. She also said that Labour’s cuts would be “fairer” than the coalitions, but I am not sure how that is achieveable. It is the most vulnerable people in society that have the greatest reliance on public services, and therefore any cuts to public spending are going to affect them most.

The main reason I cannot vote Labour in this by-election is because there has still been no apology for what Phil Woolas did, nor any internal action taken against other Labour members of the Woolas campaign. An apology for his leaflets from Labour was a red-line issue for me – I would not vote Labour without that.

Debbie Abrahams said to me that Ed Miliband had apologised, and that “I was standing next to him when he did so”. I cannot find any evidence for this online; the closest is this article from the indefatigable Saddleworth News (their by-election coverage has been exemplary). When asked directly if he apologises for Woolas’s leaflets, Ed Miliband only says that he has “regret” over them. Which is not good enough for me.

I voted Lib Dem in May, and I’m sure you will be astonished to hear that I won’t be doing so this time. This is not only because Elwyn Watkins has said he would have voted for the tuition fees increase. As I’ve argued before, this is a ridiculous position that goes against not only his pre-election pledge, but also his party’s coalition agreement. Actually, the main reason why I shall not be lending Watkins my vote is because he has repeatedly said he would like to “rip up” the European Convention on Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. It is admittedly impressive that a Liberal Democrat is able to attack Phil Woolas from the right on immigration and asylum issues, and if I think about it too much my head will probably explode.

Given the sluggish Tory campaign, the next MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth will almost certainly be either Debbie Abrahams or Elwyn Watkins. Despite what I’ve said above, I would not be too displeased with either of them as my MP, for all their faults. They would both certainly be an improvement on the previous incumbent.

However, I am going to vote Green on Thursday, for Peter Allen. I met him on Uppermill High Street last Saturday, and he came across as down-to-earth and friendly. I’ve written before that I was impressed by Caroline Lucas at the Green Conference in Birmingham, whilst some of my favourite bloggers are Greens. They are also the only party that have a coherent anti-cuts message, and for that alone they deserve backing.

Paperback Rioter’s Review of 2010

This is the seemingly obligatory end-of-year roundup. Like this blog, this review does not intend to be comprehensive or systematic, and instead hopes to be personal and idiosyncratic. With that in mind, let’s roll:

Worst moment of 2010: After delivering leaflets and door-knocking until 9.30pm on election night for Elwyn Watkins, and then staying up until 2pm waiting for the result to come in, finding out that Phil Woolas had been elected MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth by 103 votes.

Best moment of 2010: Finding out that Phil Woolas had lost his appeal, and was indeed kicked out of Parliament and barred from standing as an MP for three years.

Subject I have been unhealthily obsessed with this year: Go on, take a flying guess…

Other highlights of my year:
- My two weeks shadowing at a primary school, which I absolutely loved, and I realised that primary teaching was what I wanted to do.
- Finding out that some people actually like what I write on this blog.
- Brad Haddin getting out to make Australia 77-7 in the last Ashes match.
- I also attended my first wedding (congratulations, Becky and Nick!).

I could list many more, but that would get a bit dull for you. Basically, in 2010 I had a great time.

Quote of the year: “Yes we can. But…”  – Barack Obama on the Daily Show.

Ironic fact of the year: The Daily Telegraph and the rest of the right-wing press conducted a desperate smear campaign against Nick Clegg in the last week of the election campaign. Who would have thought that the best way to make him unelectable and discredited was to appoint him Deputy Prime Minister?

My favourite news clip of 2010: The Daily Show coverage of the BP oil spill, back in the days when you thought the leaking would never stop.

The fact that proved Test cricket is still the shizzle in 2010: I had completely forgotten that England won the World T20 cup until Aatif talked about it on Test Match Sofa yesterday.

The biggest Pyrrhic Defeat of 2010: England not being given the rights to host the 2018 World Cup. The build up to this year’s was bad enough as it is. Then when England had not been given hosting rights, the Daily Mail blamed it on the fact that our promotional video had lots of black people in it. All the talk of “passion” and the soft-core xenaphobia exhibited by some England fans after the vote was nauseating as well.

Sobering sporting fact of 2010: I have been punished for my sins in a past life by being made an Oldham Athletic fan in this one. Earlier this year our two owners, who have bankrolled the club since saving us from bankruptcy six years ago, have said they are unable to continue funding the club. Oldham’s annual turnover is less than the amount that Manchester United pay Rio Ferdinand. A striking example of the poisonous inequality affecting English football (and society) at the moment.

My five best discoveries of 2010:

1) Test Match Sofa
I cannot believe that it was only this summer I discovered this online cricket commentary station. I’ve written about them before, so don’t need to drone on about them here. Thanks for keeping me company while I wrote my thesis, chaps.

2) The Shield
I spent most of the first half of 2010 watching this TV series with my housemate John. (John, if you’re reading this, please come back! Question Time isn’t the same without you!) John glibly summarised it as “The Wire for Republicans”, and that isn’t too far off the mark. It’s a police procedural that’s absorbing, entertaining and has some damned good acting. Worth buying with your Christmas money.

3) Twitter
I set up my @goldenstrawb Twitter account last year, but only really started tweeting this year. Since then it’s helped me make some new friends, brought my attention to some very impressive blogs, and kept my sanity during Question Time (just about) by being able to live-tweet it. What’s not to love?

4) Tony Judt
I sadly only found out about Tony Judt and his work after the publicity that surrounded his tragically early death in August. I’ve been making up for lost time since then: I’ve read Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, read some of Reappraisals, and bought (but yet to read) Postwar. He is a wonderful historian and political thinker, and shall be sorely missed.

5) Tom Lehrer
It was my very dear friend Ed who introduced me to Tom Lehrer, courtesy of this song. I can’t believe I’d lived without his sense of humour for so long.

Album of the 2010: Obviously this is Elvis Costello with National Ransom. Another very impressive album, and his most interesting since The Delivery Man in 2004. Listen to the title track, be impressed, buy the album. Or listen to it on Spotify.

Song of the Year: John Hiatt, The Open Road. I found that Hiatt’s latest album as a whole was a little bit “meh”, mainly because it was all overshadowed by this opening track, one of the best songs I’ve heard in years. 

My favourite Paperback Rioter post of 2010: The Hunt for Raoul Moat did not take place. I’m quite proud of this one.

My favourite blog post of 2010: Probably Laurie Penny’s gonzo-style piece on the Millbank Riots.

My favourite piece of writing of 2010: Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land. I found it incredibly inspiring, especially given the circumstances in which it was written. Buy the book. Just buy it.

Five reasons to be cheerful for 2011:

1) There’s a referendum on the voting system! And you should all vote Yes to AV, as I shall be explaining on this blog in tedious detail. If you don’t, expect me to come round to your house and give you a stern talking-to.

2) The student protests: It’s nice to see some political action rather than political apathy. Keeping it non-violent, and gaining support from outside the student movement, is key for the next year.

3) The implosion of the BNP in the May elections: Obviously the rise of the EDL is incredibly worrying. But let’s just be happy that there was no massive increase in vote for the BNP as some doom-mongers had thought there would be.

4) ENGLAND HAVE RETAINED THE ASHES! We’ll hold the urn until at least 2013. In your face, Australia.

5) The detention of child asylum-seekers will end during 2011: I don’t like a great deal of what this coalition government is doing, but we might as well celebrate the good stuff they do before the cuts hit/while it lasts.

If this is insufficient optimism for you, then go and read the Independent’s 21 reasons to be cheerful.

Two inspiring quotations for 2011: both by Bertrand Russell on the subject of happiness:

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

And

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Have a great New Year.

Phil Woolas: still crazy after all these years

Apologies for not blogging sooner on the Phil Woolas news. I wasn’t sure what to say, until I heard the man himself speaking straight after leaving court last Friday. It’s very impressive: every sentence contains an inaccuracy. It therefore deserves a good old-fashioned fisk. Woolas’s remarks are in italics; my commentary isn’t.

“The judges have said that there is no avenue of appeal for my electors, who elected me at four general elections, to have their say.”

Well, this is stretching it a bit. The judges found Woolas guilty under s. 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983. That, I would argue, is the main conclusion they reached.

The fact is, that Parliament never intended for there to be a right of appeal in cases such as these. As this BBC blog puts it:

Mr Woolas did well to get even [as far as judicial review].

The law was deliberately drafted to avoid exactly this kind of legal delay; once an MP has been disqualified, they are expected to simply shut-up and go.

So the fact that Woolas was granted a judicial review on the facts, and yet his appeal was rejected anyway, is worth recounting.

Also, the people of Oldham East and Saddleworth will now have a say in a by-election. Woolas cannot stand, because he broke election law, and his punishment was to be disqualified as a candidate for three years. It is surely right and proper that if you have broken election law, you should receive some sanction for it.

So, one sentence in and Woolas has already got three things wrong. Let’s carry on.

“This is the only area of law, as far as I can see, where there is no appeal.”

This makes little sense. The court granted Woolas the right to appeal against the facts, but said that he had dishonestly made untrue statements against Elwyn Watkins that Woolas knew were untrue. As the summary judgement shows, the original election court said that Woolas had made three untrue statements that were illegal. The decision last week granted him leave to appeal, yet still found him guilty on two of those three charges.

[a little addition thanks to Peter: there are further avenues Woolas could appeal to from the High Court (such as the Court of Appeal) but he is not going any further. Not that this means the factual findings would change]

“We won on the costs argument, we won on the point of law, that I’m pleased with.”

I assume the costs argument means that he no longer has to pay Watkins’ costs. Woolas neglects the fact that he has to pay a £5000 fine.

“But the judges’ hands were tied by what is out of date law.”

This is nonsense. The law Woolas was found guilty under was passed in 1983. It was amended by New Labour, and as I’ve pointed out before, Woolas voted for that law!

After this, Woolas says thanks to both people in Oldham and Labour for the support he’s had. Then a journalist asks “What mistakes did you make, Mr Woolas?”, at around 1.02 on the video.

“I don’t believe I did make any mistakes.”

Still no apology for stirring up racial tensions. Still no apology for trying to “make the white vote angry” in a town that had race riots less than nine years ago and has a fairly significant BNP presence. Still no acknowledgement he’s broken the law.

“I believe I’m the victim of the circumstances of this law.”

Woolas is trying to paint himself as the victim. That’s an, er, interesting move.

“As I say, I believe it’s unfair that the electorate have not got the chance to say what they think.”

They do, in an upcoming by-election. Though if opinion polls were anything to go by, 71% of voters backed the electoral courts’ decision.

But he must have some regrets, surely? Only a moral vacuum could have no regrets over the kind of campaign that he led.

“I don’t regret anything that has been said.”

Oh.

“My argument is that my election leaflet and the way that has… (pause) this was one leaflet in fifteen years of Parliament that I’ve been thrown of out Parliament for.”

Although, of course, it was two leaflets. Woolas was found to have made illegal remarks in both The Saddleworth and Oldham Examiner and the Labour Rose. Sigh.

“My argument was and is that wooing certain types of vote, that is a political comment.”

Indeed. But the court decided differently. See paragraphs 121 and 122 of the full judgement. The court has said that merely saying that Watkins was an “extremist” would have been a political statement on his position, and therefore not illegal:

However when it was asserted in The Examiner that those whose votes were being wooed by Mr Watkins were those who were not simply extremists but those who advocated extreme violence, in particular against Mr Woolas, it plainly suggested, as the Election Court found, that Mr Watkins was wiling to condone threats of violence in pursuit of political advantage. It was not then a statement about the type of support he was wooing, but a statement that he was willing to condone threats of violence. That further statement took the statement from being a statement as to Mr Watkins’ political position to a statement about his personal character – that he conducted criminal conduct. It is not simply an implied statement in relation to a political matter, but a statement that goes to his personal character as a man who condones extreme violence. (my emboldening)

Woolas goes on:

“I never said, as some have said, that the Liberal Democrats supported violence. That is a preposterous thing to say. Of course that is not the case.”

This is the weakest of straw men. I’m slightly obsessed with the Woolas case, as you might have noticed, and I have not read once, in any of the reports connected with it, that he accused the Liberal Democrats of supporting violence.

But that was the interpretation given by the judges.

*hits the roof, goes absolutely apoplectic, kicks kitten*

Apologies for that outburst of anger, but Phil Woolas brings out the worst in me. As the judgement clearly shows, this was related to the personal conduct of Elwyn Watkins, not the Liberal Democrats. To say otherwise is a complete untruth.

Not by the people, but by judges. And I regret that much.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is a fallacy to suggest that it is undemocratic for judges to intervene in this way.

That’s enough for now. I’m going to have a lie-down.

Some people just don’t get it

On the whole, I’m heartened by Labour reactions to Phil Woolas’s expulsion from both Parliament and his Party. The reaction of the Parliamentary Labour Party has been an entirely different matter. This anger from Labour MPs depresses me more than I can say, but it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

There are three other general types of reaction to the Woolas case that I think are worth addressing:

1) Politicians won’t be able to debate with each other properly

For instance, Edward Leigh, a Conservative MP, said:

What worries me about this is that, if this is allowed to stand, it will be virtually impossible for there to be really robust debate during elections.

People will be terrified of attacking their opponents.

This sort of comment displays a startling amount of ignorance about what Woolas said, and the ruling of the judges.

The judges ruled that Woolas told false statements about Elwyn Watkins’ character, and that he knew were untrue. They found that this was true beyond all reasonable doubt.

Compare this to the negative campaigning Woolas engaged in against Chris Davies in the by-election in 1995. They called him “high on tax and soft on drugs” because he supported higher taxes on the rich and the establishment of a Royal Commission to consider legalising drugs.

You might not like this sort of negative campaigning, but it’s not illegal. It’s a caricature of Davies’s position, for sure, but it’s not as if Davies didn’t hold those views.

In the judgement itself, the judges give three areas where Woolas knowingly lied about Watkins:

(i) The statement in the Examiner that the Respondent had attempted to woo the vote, that is, that he had attempted to seek the electoral support, of Muslims who advocated violence, in particular to the Respondent.

(ii) The statement in the Labour Rose that the Petitioner had refused to condemn extremists who advocated violence against the Respondent.

(iii) The statement in the election address that the Petitioner had reneged on his promise to live in the constituency.

Aside from the inflammatory nature of the leaflets, these were deliberately-told lies about Watkins. These lies and smears were so bad they were illegal. It won’t stop negative campaigning, or even politicians exaggerating or bending the truth about each other, but might (hopefully) stop deliberate smears.

2) Political Parties lie on manifestos

Steve McCabe is quoted in the Birmingham Mail as saying:

I wonder if this means votes on tuition fees will result in the courts ordering a string of by elections in Lib Dem marginals?

For a start, it’s incredibly hypocritical of Labour to get all high and mighty about opponents doing the opposite thing to what they said in their election manifestos. It was Labour who originally said that they would not introduce tuition fees, and then did so. By announcing that they would not campaign for AV on Friday, Andy Burnham has basically said that Labour won’t bother trying to campaign for one of their manifesto pledges.

Also, governments have to do lots of things that weren’t mentioned in their manifestos, because circumstances change. You won’t find anything about going to war with Iraq in the 2001 Labour manifesto, for instance.

There’s also nothing in the 1983 Act (that I can find, anyway) relating to false promises on manifestos. s106 of the Representation of the People’s Act only refers to False statement against candidates, which is what Woolas has been found guilty under. So no, there won’t be a series of by-elections Mr McCabe. 

3) Unelected judges should not overturn a democratic election

Comments on this have come from both left and right. Sally Bercow on twitter said:

Yep – not *at all* liking unelected judges overturning democratic result. Slippery slope.

Edward Leigh and Steve McCabe also made similar comments in the posts I linked to.

Again, this level of ignorance about the legal system is shocking. The case is on whether election law was broken. And it’s judges who interpret the laws that elected MPs pass. That’s their job. It’s called the separation of powers, it’s quite famous and useful.

As I mentioned above, it’s politicians who make these laws. And Woolas was found guilty of illegal practices under Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 (False statements as to candidates).

This section was most recently amended by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. According to www.publicwhip.org.uk, guess who voted in favour of this legislation?

Yep, that’s right. A certain Mr Phil Woolas MP.*

Hoisted by own’s own petard.

On a slightly more serious point, the outcome of the election must also have been shown to be affected by these lines. I don’t see how it’s more democratic for a candidate to win an election based on smears against his opponent that he knew were untrue. Woolas only won by 103 votes, so these leaflets must have played some part in this tight victory.

I will probably post later on whether Labour’s treatment of Woolas is just, but I think that’s enough for now.

*I’m grateful to my brother for pointing this out to me, and for help with legal mumbo-jumbo in the case generally.

The rise and fall of Philip James Woolas

It is hard to think of a series of more cliched jobs for a Labour politician Phil Woolas could have had before becoming an MP. They cover the usual bases of student politics (President of the NUS), media work (a producer for Newsnight and ITN) and working for a trade union (Head of Communications for the GMB Union), which he did before entering Parliament in 1997.

His rise through the Parliamentary Labour Party was swift and straightforward. Two years after entering Parliament he was made a PPS, and then became a whip in 2001. After serving as Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (2003-5), and a Minister for both Local Government (2005-7) and the Environment (2007-8) Woolas was made Minister for Immigration in Gordon Brown’s reshuffle on 3rd October, 2008.

All this was smooth progress. Woolas was earmarked as a rising star of the Labour Party long before the Daily Mirror dubbed him with that cliche in April this year. He learned the art of political campaigning from Peter Mandelson himself (more on that later) and the job at Immigration was presumably seen as a stepping stone to something greater in the party.

Yet less than two years after being made Minister for Immigration, and less than seven months after being called a rising star by the Daily Mirror, Woolas’s political career is in tatters. He has been ejected from Parliament, barred from standing in any election for three years, and  might not even have a future in the Labour Party.

It is a mark of just how, for want of a better way of putting it, eventful Woolas’s time at immigration was that few people are shedding tears at his demise. Quite the opposite, in fact. Good riddance, says the most popular left-wing blog. Toxic, says another. Enemies of reason, in one of my favourite blogs on Woolas’s career at immigration, calls him “the man who tried to make New Labour into a Daily Mail wet dream”.

So what did he actually do as Minister for Immigration?

1) Woolas erroneously said that unemployment was caused by immigration:

Phil Woolas told the Times immigration became an “extremely thorny” subject if people were losing their jobs.

“It’s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it’s going to get harder,” he said.

2) He referred to an “immigration industry” where:

NGOs and migration lawyers Woolas says, “by giving false hope and by undermining the legal system [they] actually cause more harm than they do good.” Where that leaves the 200 people who turned out to support the Kachepa family, for example, as they were dragged from their home by Home Office officials, or the communities across the country working to prevent friend and neighbours from being deported, Woolas doesn’t say. Maybe he’d suggest these misguided souls just aren’t reading the right newspapers although I think you’d struggle to paint the residents of Glasgow’s Kingsway estate as Guardianistas.

3) Most disgustingly of all, he called Conservative governments soft on immigration for letting in Ugandan Asians who were persecuted by Idi Amin. From the David Aaronovitch article linked to in Chicken Yoghurt:

Mr Woolas: “It’s assumed that Labour is soft on immigration. In actual fact the largest influxes of migrants into this country came during Conservative periods of government – if you look at the 1950s and early 1960s and indeed the situation with Eastern Africa.”

“The situation with Eastern Africa”? He means the time when the Kenyan and Ugandan Asians were expelled, and arrived in a Britain for which they had passports, where they were called “Paki”, and where they became some of the most successful and dynamic citizens this nation has possessed. And this is used by a Labour minister, a Labour minister, to attack past Conservative governments for softness on immigration! I wanted to throw up.

 4) Authorised the use of force to deport the young, vulnerable and mentally ill. See this story broken recently by Liberal Conspiracy:

When in government, Woolas authorised security guards employed by private contractors Serco and G4S to use “physical control in care (PCC)” techniques to remove people resisting deportation.

Not only did that include mothers with mental health problems, but children under the age of 18.

More recently, these “physical control in care” techniques led to the death of Jimmy Mubenga on 14th October 2010.

Phil Woolas was not connected to the Mubenga incident, but the same company, G4S, was instructed under his watch.

5) Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned his stance on the Gurkhas.

Getting the white vote angry

It became clear during the election campaign this year that Woolas’s seat was under threat from Elwyn Watkins’s Lib Dem campaign. Oldham East and Saddleworth was one of the key Labour/Lib Dem marginals in 2005, but in that election Woolas increased his majority. Ironically, there were disputes over whether the Lib Dem candidate, Tony Dawson, had doctored photos in that campaign. At the time there were also doubts over whether Dawson lived in the constituency as he claimed, and that he had made some sweary posts on internet message boards, but I can’t find a link to an article about them now. Suffice to say that, especially with the Lib Dem surge in the polls, Woolas’s notional majority of 3500 was looking rather shakey indeed.

His campaign team realised that as well:

An email by Woolas’s election agent, Joseph Fitzpatrick, to the candidate declared: “We need . . . to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him out . . . If we don’t get the white vote angry, he’s gone.” Another from Fitzpatrick to Steve Green, the MP’s campaign adviser, said: “We need to go strong on the militant Muslim (sic) angle” and proposed the headline “Militant Muslims (sic) target Woolas.”

This has disturbing parallels with the by-election Woolas fought for the seat in 1995, when it was known as Littleborough and Saddleworth. This is what Peter Mandelson had to say about the affair in The Third Man:

After the campaign was over, not only our opponents but some in Labour would denounce our “negative” tactics in highlighting Lib Dem front-runner Chris Davies’s support for higher taxes and a Royal Commission to liberalise drugs laws. [He was portrayed by Labour as being "high on crime and soft on drugs" - Cory] For tactical reasons, I felt we had had little choice. Labour was starting from third place, and especailly in a by-election, the bulk of Tory tactical voting was always going to flow to the Lib Dems. If we were to win, we would have to make that option as distasteful as possible. In the end, it didn’t work – or not quite enough. Davies won and Phil Woolas came second, though by a margin of only 2,000 votes. Our share of the vote was up by 15 per cent, while the Tories were down by more than 20 per cent. When Phil spoke at our almost victory party, he singled me out for thanks, memorably proclaiming, “Peter may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”.

It’s no wonder then that Woolas shows no remorse in his statement, and indeed seems to be trying to appeal against the decision (which, as I understand it, is impossible). He has no qualms with playing the race card to such divisive effect in a town like Oldham, where there were race riots less than a decade ago. Just in case it isn’t clear now: Phil Woolas is a moral vacuum.

The campaign literature that Woolas’s campaign put out in Oldham East and Saddleworth certainly tried to make voting Lib Dem as distasteful as possible in May. Please just look at it, and then try and say this is all just part of the rough and tumble of normal political campaigning. This one is perhaps the worst, and most well known, but the others are hideous too:

Aside from the obvious, which is that to stir up racial tensions like this is abhorrent, it’s also illegal. As the judgement of the court makes clear:

For the reasons which we have given we are sure that the Respondent made statements of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of the Petitioner which he had no reasonable grounds for believing were true and did not believe were true.(my italics) Those statements were as follows:

Woolas won by only 103 votes, so it’s a virtual certainty that these lies about Watkins influenced the outcome of the election.

Labour may want to try and paint Woolas as their “fall guy”, and it’s certainly not just Woolas who is trying to out-right the right, but spreading deliberate lies about a political opponent that you knew to be untrue is something else entirely. As this blog is long enough, I just want to explain via a diagram how bad Woolas’s actions were, and by how far he had crossed the line:

One of the reasons I detest New Labour is their pandering to the racism and distortion of some of our tabloid media. Too cowardly to try and make a difficult, principled argument, they strove for power for power’s sake, rather than bothering to achieve anything worth achieving. Phil Woolas is the ultimate example of this. He is one of the main reasons I felt I could not give my vote to Labour in May, and the fact that Ed Miliband gave him a shadow ministerial portfolio before his expulsion from Parliament gives me great misgivings about his leadership too.

Remember, remember the fifth of November. I certainly will remember this November 5th for a long time to come.

A quick shout out to Nick Thornsby, who’s blogging on the Woolas case has been consistently superb and informative. Thank you.

My initial thoughts on the Woolas verdict

The verdict today should serve as a warning to lying scoundrels everywhere.

I’m now going off for a celebratory pint, and suggest you all do the same.

My reaction to finding out Phil Woolas was in the shadow cabinet

Thankfully Sunny Hundal has written a far more sensible post on why he shouldn’t be there.

I’m saving my Woolas rage until after the court case is over.