Liberalism isn't dead, it's just been hit by a truck

"We're British people, with all their qualities and faults, with feelings and emotions, and not denationalised, impersonal polyglot cynics with the generous emotions of a fish, intimidated by fears that what we feel like saying will be 'bad propaganda'."

Any guesses? It was the morning directive written by the director of the BBC European Service, Noel Newsome, on the news of the fall of Singapore in 1942.  It isn't quite how we would express ourselves now, but I thought of it on Friday after the news of the general election results.

Newsome led a staff of 500, broadcasting in more than 30 languages, the biggest broadcasting operation in the world, then and now.  He was also a Liberal.  He believed that, for the BBC news to sound authentic across occupied Europe, it must not be spun.  It had to sound British.  It's origins had to be obvious.  It was a sophisticated and controversial point of view.

I think he was right.  You have to be human about these things.  You can't spin them.  You can't pretend, as Nigel Farage did, that you somehow don't mind.

That was, anyway, my feeling when I was woken at 5.45 on the morning of May 8 by the Guardian, asking me to write about it for Comment is Free.  I had an hour or so to work out what other disasters I had missed in the previous few hours and get my thoughts together.  Here it is.

I was pleased, of course, that they decided to publish it again in the paper the following morning.  But nervous.

For one thing, my raw feelings of 24 hours before had changed somewhat.  I'd begun to see things a little more clearly.  For another, they stuck a headline on which said that the Liberal project was 'dead', which I emphatically didn't believe, and didn't say.

Yes, it had been hit by a ten-ton truck, and was in intensive care, but it was definitely, emphatically, still alive.

I was also little ashamed that I was wallowing in my own grief - and the results felt to many of us like a bereavement - when I had it easy compared to so many others.  I had not given years of dedicated, imaginative and tough-minded service to the nation and the party, only to find myself out of office and out of a job - and on television too.

People who had genuinely made a difference like Danny Alexander, or pioneered the revival of apprenticeships like Vince Cable, or been a brilliant and much-loved MPs like Tessa Munt and Martin Horwood and Andrew George and so many others.  It seemed so desperately undeserved. I will write about Nick Clegg in a few days' time, but I feel particularly proud to have been involved in the party under his leadership.

No, they didn't get everything right - who does? - but my goodness they tried, and nothing I wrote should detract from that.

I have realised in the last few days how much I have needed to believe, throughout my adult life, that the world was improving, the causes I've devoted so much energy to growing in strength.  To encounter such a setback has been a profound shock for many of us - especially as we are now ruled by an elected-yet-unelected selection of privileged people who don't understand the modern world, and whose power is now unfettered.

But I'll tell you what I did.  I went for a long walk last night, up on the past behind my house and onto the South Downs Way, the old white track used back to the Stone Age.  It put these disasters into the context of history.  A little.  History fluctuates, after all.

Speaking of which, I keep thinking of the 1945 general election as a disappointment for Liberals almost as great as 2015 - reduced to 12 seats, a charismatic leader who had been a successful coalition minister, a campaign focusing on international issues when the  voters wanted to hear about social ones, and huge Liberal hopes...

Noel Newsome, mentioned above, left his job running Radio Luxembourg to contest Penrith and Cockermouth  for the Liberals and came within 2,600 votes of unseating the sitting Conservative. These days, the seat is next to Tim Farron's where he managed to win more than 50 per cent of the vote on Thursday.

More of Newsome another day.  In the meantime, I hope those non-Liberals who read this blog will forgive me for my single-minded focus on Liberalism for the next few days - I can't help it...

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First thoughts on electoral disaster

The Liberal Revival has been woven through my life, and especially my adult life.  I wrote this in the early hours of this morning for the Guardian Comment section.

Yes, B and C grades are certainly saner

I'm coming to the conclusion that the Great British Public (they don't call it that any more) is not nearly as switched off the election as we are given to believe.  Everyone I know seems to be wrestling with it, and their specific decision.

They are not wrestling with the issues, exactly.  They are wrestling with the BBC version of the election - a decision between various different marketing strategies.  Another thing entirely.

I find that gap frustrating but, finally, I ran across a story which sums up the issues for me.  It is the one about exams.  This is what the Evening Standard wrote:

"Teenagers should settle for B or C grades and not strive for perfection in every subject, the head of a London private school says.  Heather Hanbury, headmistress of the Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, said parents and pupils now view A and A* grades as the norm, which devalues results and harms students’ self-esteem. Perfection is only occasionally a worthwhile aim, Mrs Hanbury said, and knowing when something is “good enough”, and keeping a sense of perspective, are 'essential life skills'.  Instead of completing every piece of homework perfectly, Mrs Hanbury advised students to settle for a lower grade and spend more time on extracurricular activities such as sport..."

A few points about this.  Heather Hanbury is exactly right.  She is also flying in the face of everything which is believed, and has been believed for the nation, by the great triumvirate that rules us: the Conservatives, the Labour Party and the civil service.

For them, education has been a utilitarian affair, measured by the inadequate indicators which are used solely because they can be measured.  We have lived through management by numbers, by targets, and a great dullness spread across the school system.  It wasn't about life, or even finding ways to live life better - it was about showing up well in the Prime Minister's graphs.

But the coalition came and they invested in schools - and, thanks to the Lib Dems, launched the pupil premium.  But they did not fully understand the damage that the technocratic worldview in New Labour was doing to education - or the rest of public services.  They did not grasp the dangers of services designed like assembly lines.  In education, it means narrow outlooks, narrow horizons, ignorance and insane specialisation.

Worse, they allowed some schools to pay bonuses to teachers for good SATS results, turbo-charging the soullessness, damaging rounded education and dulling-down the classroom.  Transforming children from the beneficiaries of individual attention into the means by which teachers could achieve their bonus results.

So, yes, Heather Hanbury is right.  In the name of Tony Blair's 'modernisation', we have actually nudged education backwards.  Not everywhere - my children's primary schools are brilliant, imaginative models of their kind.

But here is what worries me.  Why does this saner approach have to be articulated in public by an independent school headteacher?  Why are we not allowed to have state headteachers publicly rejecting the wisdom of their bureaucracies?  And why has this critical issue - the critical issue for me - played no role in the election debate whatsoever?  

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Independent schools: no longer for the likes of us

I went to a school reunion last weekend.  I'm not sure why these events are so nerve-wracking - perhaps we are afraid of encountering our own age and failures in the faces of our fellows.  In the event, of course, everyone was exactly the same.

Some of us meet up anyway every few months.  We are middle-aged, middle class survivors, in a sense. Some of our fellow public schoolboys from the 1970s have died. One or two have even committed suicide, but we are still around, largely happy, not always thriving, but settled. What is most unexpected about the small group of us who meet more often is how diverse we are.

There are two builders, a furniture restorer, a very successful barrister, a medical consultant, an Alexander Technique teacher, and a writer (me). There is also a fireman, an undertaker, a sales director, and an engineer, among others.  I'm sad to say the garage owner just died.

We spent our whole schooldays being told how privileged we were, and we were certainly privileged in many ways – most of us own our own homes. But if you believe the rhetoric about independent schools, on either side of the political divide, you might have expected us to have been more of a cohesive group.

We're not the narrow slice of the class system you might have predicted. We seem actually to straddle a huge variety of different kinds of middle classes, but we all worry about our children, and their ability to survive in the world that is emerging, here and abroad.

More about this in my book Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis. But back to last weekend.

The highlight of the dinner was the headmaster's speech, inevitably asking us for money for scholarships and explaining - rather oddly actually - that the huge rise in fees since the days when we went there were unavoidable.

The explanation he gave for this was the rising cost of regulation.  They now include in the staff two full-time compliance officers.

I'm sure this is onerous, but the fees for boarders hover around £30,000 a year.  At that rate, you only need two or three extra pupils to pay the costs of the compliance officers. No explanation why they need 17 all-weather pitches.

I have nothing but goodwill towards my old school, to which I owe a great deal.  I have nothing in principle against independent education either.  It would be hypocritical of me, and anyway I believe in as much diversity in education as possible.

But it is time to accept that the independent sector is not really for the middle classes any more.  That was certainly the conclusion I came to making Clinging On for the BBC, when I visited the Independent Schools Fair in Battersea Park and asked anyone I met to describe the parents who could afford it - mainly foreign, they said.  In oil or finance.

Already a third of independent school pupils are getting help with fees.  It doesn't look good.  The truth is that the sector has let down the middle classes which used to rely on it as an alternative, rather as they relied on the BBC to keep up broadcasting standards.

I don't take much comfort that a major element of educational diversity has been handed over to   the ubermensch.  As you can tell, I didn't find the speech by the headmaster terribly convincing.  It was like being asked for a contribution to the coffers by HSBC's mergers division on the grounds that I had once enjoyed an account at one of their local branches.

It is part of my thesis in the book that the institutions which once nurtured the middle classes, and helped them thrive, have now gone - local banks, monopoly watchdogs with teeth, truly independent financial advisers, small-scale public services, affordable homes.  They will have to be rebuilt, laboriously, all over again.

A pity we never heard that debated in the election campaign.

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Why is the election so po-faced?

There never was an election campaign in history, at least outside the USA, so desperately lacking in authenticity.

Yes, there are some exceptions.  The revelation of SNP aggression last night, as they battered Jim Murphy and Eddie Izzard, did at least appear to be a glimpse of something real.  Otherwise, it is exhausted slogans (exhumed from the 1940s), fake concern, and very, very careful politicians.

I found myself thinking about this a little more after the revelation of Ed Miliband's much-ridiculed tablet of stone.  It revealed the need for something authentic - it was just that the words slipped through your fingers.  The pledges were as good as meaningless.

The trouble is that these very careful words are there for a reason: fear of the other side's negative campaigning.  Fear of the forensic interview or a hectoring tabloid.

One of the few national politicians who manages to wrap himself in the mantle of authenticity is Boris Johnson, mainly because he dares to use humour and, when the humour gives out, he uses the most dangerously lurid images.  The idea of Ed Miliband with a monkey on his back stays with me, whether I like it or not.

But the authenticity of Boris is in doubt as well, rather as Tony Blair's authenticity was.  Is it a skilful hoax? Is there anything there behind the mask? Does the man actually have any convictions at all? The jury remains out.

When I was writing about authenticity more intensely (see my book of essays The Age to Come), I happened to hear one of Howard Dean's campaign managers interviewed on the subject.  To seem authentic, he said, politicians need to go off message.  Just occasionally.

Perhaps it's too much to expect them to do so now, 48 hours before polling.  It is just so dangerous.  But the rewards of getting it right are pretty high, if only they dared.

But I do find it strange that they don't even take the intermediate path, as Boris Johnson does.  There are nations which might take offence when a politician makes a joke, or feel that the issues they represent have been demeaned.  But we are not the USA: why are so few of our politicians being humorous?

I remember Lord Holme, who ran the Lib Dem campaign in 1997, making a specific point of making jokes at the morning press conference.  He did so quite deliberately to differentiate the party from the others. Not politicians' jokes either - these can tend to be heavy-handed non-humour at their opponents' expense - but real humour of a more genuine and human kind.

Why are they so staggeringly po-faced?  Do they really think that humour will undermine their own seriousness?

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Negativity is throttling public interest in the election

I’ve spent the last weekend partly in the constituency of Wells, to help in the Lib Dem bid to get Tessa Munt re-elected. I was hardly a long visit but I feel I’ve learned something important about this election.

There has been some comment about how tame the national election has been – how few people put posters in their windows these days, and so on.

But go to Wells, and you find yourself in one of the epicentres of the campaign – and you can see what happens when Conservative money clashes with Liberal energy. Practically every street and ever hedge is covered with posters, blue or orange. My children counted them through the constituency, and there seems to be a practical dead heat.

There is all to play for, and if Tessa isn’t re-elected, it won't be the fault of her supporters (and I very much hope she is, because she’s a brilliant MP).

But what really astonished me was that the Conservatives have used their superior funds to buy up the most recent edition of the local paper. They bought the right hand block below the masthead, and down the right hand side of the front page (which had no indication that this was an advertisement). They bought the next two full pages too. I don’t know what this actually cost, but the whisper is that it cost £9,000.

Over again through this extensive advertisement, David Cameron’s face was juxtaposed with a little group of faces – Miliband’s, Sturgeon’s and Salmond’s – with many descriptions of the chaos if one or all of them find their way into the government of the UK.

I don’t know what effect this will have, though I suspect that this kind of electoral advertisement goes in one eye and out the other – it is deeply dull. But, as I delivered copies of a letter from Tessa, written in a personal way and wholly positive, I found myself wondering again how politicians can so misjudge their literature.

Rather as politicians misjudge their language (even the Lib Dems have been using 1940s slogans like 'Opportunity for All' which I don't believe anyone hears any morre).

So much of local literature is also filled with a rather pompous, offended, uncertain amour propre. Some of it is downright offensive. So little of it has any kind of positivity and generosity of spirit, let alone vision.

But equally, this kind of political advertisement, this incessant, brutal negativity, does explain to some extent why the polls seem not to have moved at all.

How can you be visionary against this kind of negative campaigning. And of course, all political parties are tempted down the negative path to a greater or lesser extent. It explains the reticence, the carefully constructed verbal formulae, the evasiveness, the constant mild dishonesty.

But really, nobody spreads negativity like the national Conservative Party machinery, armed and guarded by the Conservative Press.

It was at this point in the campaign last time that my step-brother, who was at the same college as Nick Clegg at the same time, but didn;t know him, was called up by tabloid journalists desperately seeking ammunition against Cleggmania (ah, those were the days!).

Really, if you wonder why politicians are so evasive, these are the places I would heap most of the blame (but not all): the Conservative Party national machine and the tabloid press. Oh yes, and Jeremy Paxman.

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The emerging rage with Labour

It isn't an uncommon experience during the election to stare open-mouthed, night after night, at the television - staggered that nobody else seems to see things the way you do.

That is partly a sign of mild instability, of course.  But it may also be a ubiquitous experience for sane people as well.  It is an odd election, after all.

And I'll tell you what the oddest element is for me.  It is the apparently universal opinion, in the commentariat, that Ed Miliband is having a good campaign.

I'm aware, of course, that expectations were low.  I'm aware that most people believed he and the Labour Party would fall on their faces in the first week of the campaign, and they didn't.  But compare Labour's performance, stuck on one of their lower vote shares in the history of the party, with what might have been expected of them in years gone by.

This is after all the official opposition, facing a not particularly popular coalition in the midst of austerity and worryingly tight budgets.  Yet, the BBC poll of polls last night put them on just 33 per cent.

Of course, this is partly about Scotland, where the latest poll I saw showed Labour just within three points of the hated Tories.  An unheard of reverse.

But Scotland is a symptom of the same basic problem - the slow but inexorable decline of Labourism, the dawning understanding of what Labourism has meant in Scottish cities, just as in English ones.  Also perhaps (or maybe this is just me) the bizarre way in which Andy Burnham can stomp around complaining about the 'marketisation' of the NHS when he was part of the government which marketised it in the first place.

So here we are: three of the deep reasons why this election appears to mark a hopeless nadir for the Labour Party, not a hopeful challenge after all:

1.  Because of the policy gap.  This has been a huge gap since the Second World War between what they argue in opposition compared to what they do in office: PFI contracts, nuclear energy, massive controlling IT projects, and the enthusiastic McKinsey-isation of public services.

2.  Because of public housing.  Again, Scotland is at the sharp end here.  Look what Labour did to Glasgow - the miserable, soulless slum estates, prisons for the poor, that Labour built there.  No wonder they appear to have brought such rage down on their heads.

3.  Because they think the own the poor.  Try to oust them from places they consider their own (Tower Hamlets springs to mind) and the bitterness with which they will fight back is really staggering.  No, the dark side of the Spirit of '45 is alive and well and living in slum housing, PFI contracts and the inner city machine.

The problem with Labour is that it stands for nothing (I agree that the Lib Dems have done passable imitations of this too in the past).  It has no coherent, unifying ideology.  It has no continuity between opposition and government.  As we watch, it appears to be being left behind by parties which - for all their faults - have a purpose and a vision.

I would suggest that this is the real story of the 2015 campaign, the emerging rage with Labour.  But I appear to be the only one who thinks so, in England at least.  What does that make me?

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