Across the pond

Despite the thousands of words being written in the papers and on the web sites, and the chat on  the broadcast media, Nick Clegg does not have to agonise over whether he should choose to back the Conservatives or Labour. An alliance with Labour does not have any hope of firm government.

There is no agreement in the Labour Party as  to who should be the new leader. Which is why Gordon Brown was not asked to step down a year or two ago.The  favourite candidate then  was David Miliband, who decided to support Brown instead. This time around he is again the favourite candidate.

Unlike Brown he is not a  bully. And he is younger, and is therefore believed to be more in touch with the concerns of young people today.  The doubts about him, include his younger brother, who today is said to be thinking of standing against him.

Is it going to be Cain and Abel trumpeted the media.

This is nonsense. Ed Miliband is a very long shot indeed for the Labour leadership.

But everyone knows that the Labour Party is undecided as to who its new leader should be. Because that is why Gordon Brown has led them into this election, not because his colleagues did not want to usher  him into a dignnified retirement. But because they could not agree on who should succeed him.

In terms of policies the Lib Dems are  closer to Labour than the Conservatives. But an alliance with Labour cannot provide stable government quicklly. Because Labour Party supporters have no agreement as to who why want to replace Brown.

They need to take time, to decide who shall be their next leader. But the country does not have time.

We need a new government in a week or two. Not in the month at least it will take to elect a new Labour Party leader.

And remember that Brown has  been under fire because he is un-elected. Not just by the nation. But by the Labour Party, many of whom did not want him to be the leader.

British democracy is a party  democracy. Not a Presidential democracy. Brown demolished his opponents in his own cabinet and demanded the support of the party, with no contest.

That is not democracy.

It is dictatorship.

So Clegg has Hobson’s choice. He cannot deliver stable government by an alliance with Labour, because he cannot predict, who is going to emerge as the leader of New New Labour, in a month or so’s time.

So he should be concentrating on how to work with David Cameron, whose party  want  to usher in a series of cuts which will hit the poorest, rather than the rich.

Because in Camerono’s terms, the rich need to be nurtured, because they are the ‘entrepeneurs’ who will provide the private sector jobs to fuel our recovery.

That will be their priority.

What Clegg needs to do, is to use his power to minimise the Conservative tendency, to get the peasants to take the strain.

He needs to say clearlly to Cameron that if this recession, when the poor are gcing to be  hit, he has to get the rich to share the strain.

Not abolishing inheritance tax on assets,  below £100,o00.

The important question is not  whether to align with the Tories or Labour. It is whether he can work with Cameron to steer the country out of its present problems.

Cameron, in his leadership bid and subsequently has styled himself as a Macmillan and Disraeli Conservative. He inherited a party which was dominated by disciples of Thatcherism and Norman Tebbitt.

He made them electable again, with the help of Lord Ashcroft’s money.

But his party are not greatful. They think he would have got a bigger majority if he had behaved like Thatcher.

……..and they should resist the scare stories that the stock markets will crash if Britain does not have a new government by the end of the week. And I write as a callow working class youth, who has been watching the behaviour of the stock markets since I started my first job with the Financial Times group in 1955.

Clegg has now been offered by both governments what he campaigned for. Electoral reform and the removal of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour Party. He has got himself into this position, not be secret back room deals, although obviously he has had private talks  with Labour, even while he was negotiating with the Conservatives. He has got into this position, after consulting with his own supporters.

Not by steaming ahead and, forcing his party to fall into line.

To make his decision will take time.

And everyone in Britain, journalists, politicians and the general public need to remember is that Democracy takes time.

And particularly British democracy. Which is based not on the American Presidential system, when one man (and it has always been a man), as soon as he becomes President of the nation, the boss man who acts in the interest of the nation.

British democracy, by contrast is based on cabinet government. The Prime Minister is not the ‘chief executive’, he is the chairman of a cabinet. And he cannot do anything of an executive nature, unless his cabinet agrees with him. He is also responsible to his party. He is in post because his party elected him to represent their interests.

Unllike  the US President who is elected by popular vote. And then decides who shall be in his cabinet.

It was American democracy that got is into our present crisis.

George W Bush, who gained power thanks  to a few contested votes ( they may have been faked) went on, although he had the support of only one third of the US electorate, to give free reign to the big business bosses and to take his country, and the world, into the Iraq war. Both Blair and Brown supported these policies. So that New Labour became (which was not their intention) the party who helped the most unscrupulous and greedy bankers and company bosses, and waged war on an undoubted tyrant, on the pretext that he had weapons of mass destruction (which he did not) and he was harbouring the international terrorists, who had committed the atrocities of 9/11.

They not only ignored the evidence that Saadam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. They also ignored the fact that he was against the Muslim fundamentalists. He was put in power by the British oil company BP. He established a secular Iraq, where women did not around dressed like nuns. He was also a nasty dictatorial tyrant, who committed  many crimes.

But that is history.

The US 2010 has a  new kind of boss as President, a bloke called Barack Obama, who personifies the American dream. He is trying to bring US democracy up to date. And to deal with all the powerful rich lobbies, which tried to stop his election.

Including US citizen Rupert Murdoch, who ushered New Labour into power, but now supports  the Conservatives, and has  consistently branded the Lib Dems, as a bunch of woolly idealists, who don’t deserve serious coverage in his newspapers or on his television channels.

The  focus of attention is the last few days has been as if electoral  reform means replacing the present first past the post system with proportional represestation. But it is much wider than that.

It includes  the funding of elections, This one has seen the millions of Conservative supporters like Lord Ashcroft, and the  supporters of the very small minority party, UKIP, used  to get their posters in the front windows of houses across the country. The Lib Dems just does not have the money to compete.

By contrast New Labour has been richly funded by the trade union movement, even though both Brown and Blair before  him, have distanced themselves from their main funders. Trade unions have continued to fund the Labour Party, because the Conservatives would prefer they did not exist at all. And, because the Lib Dems are a party of the the educated middle class, who think in terms of individuals acting according to conscience, rather than class solidarity.

They want to treat the workers decently. And some of them, like Shirley Williams, are Lib Dem because of the atrocities of the union bully boys of the 1960s, who held the country to ransom. And was thought to be a power in the land, because they had tea and sandwiches at No 10  with Harold Wilson.

Under new Labour the trade union  movement, now mostly quietly doing its job in looking after the interests of workers, has  been ignored. The Downing Street of Blair and Brown has  welcomed the likes of Rupert Murdoch for cosy chats in Downing Street.

When I checked just before writing this, all the newspapers were leading on shock news that Gordon Brown was resigning to make a Lib Lab pact possible. I heard this news while watching the hour long Channel Four News programme, which spent most of the time on the implications of this dramatic move, including a photo story of Gordon Brown’s record in office. But the real news which Channel Four and all the newspapers were discussing, was in the slip of paper given to presenter Jon Snow during the programme. This, he told him, reported that David Cameron had suddenly changed track and offered the Lib Dems what they must wanted – a referendum on electoral reform.

This means that the Lib Con pact is once again on course. And that means it is the most likely outcome, because a Lib Con government would have a clear  majority. But a Lib Lab pact would mean that the balance of power would be held by the other parties, including the Scottish and Welsh natiionalists, the Northern Ireland parties and the Green MP.

Gordon Brown was told that this had happened minutes before he marched out of Downing Street once again and addressed the nation from the mobile pulpit outside the front door.

He spoke like a statesman, but he was behaving like a bull in a china shop with a great clunking fist.

He won a temporary victory, in that the news media was focussing on his news, and speculating on which of his cabinet ministers would succeed him.

Before readers  had had the  latest Lib Con proposals explained to them.

I was expecting my next blog to be an assessment of the Lib Con proposals, but I still do not know  just precisely what they are. And how the memerships of the Tory and Lib Dem grass roots are responding to them.

That needs to be explored first.

Before we hear how Brown’s Lib Lab pact can provide the stable government we need to deal with the financial crisis.

Clearly it is going to be a few days yet, before we get a new government. That is not at all unusual elsewhere in the world. And coalitions of the kind being discussed. Speedily, not hastily.

The British Constitution provides for such eventualities. Labour ministers returned to  their desks today, and instead of clearing their desks that were continuing their jobs of running the country.

The stock markets will not doubt fall tomorrow, because of the uncertainty produced by today’s antics.

But even bankers and stockbrokers are grown ups. They know full well that forming a stable government in a situation like this requires time. The speculators, on the other hand, might try and make themselves some money by selling for a quick profit in the hope that the talks may fail.

But as the European reaction to the Greek crisis today has demonstrated if governments act responsibly and together, such stock market crashes can be prevented.

This has been the most extraordinary few days of my life in British politics. Once it became clear in the small hours of Friday morning that the country was not only get a hung parliament, but the party which had caused this result, had ended up with fewer seats and, even more importantly, had come third in the popular vote, nearly all the political commentators, not just the right-wing press, have saying arguing that we shall have another election in a year or two. I agreed with them.

My gut feeling this Sunday morning is that we were all wrong. And that 2010 will go down in the history books as the biggest change since 1945, when Clement Attlee won a totally unexpected  thumping great vote which gave the Labour Party its first majority government.

My gut feeling is based on what I have heard from people I have talked with, seen on the television, heard on the radio and read in the newspapers and on the internet. And it is also based on many years of cogitation about how change happens, in which I have been influenced by many thinkers, including Thomas Kuhn, whose seminal work was on The Structure af Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn argued major change  happened suddenly. It required a paradigm shift. Almost overnight, there was a change in the basic assumptions on which scientific thought was based.

When you translate this kind of thinking to the present political situation, what is immediately apparent that the reason why the commentators, including mysnelf have got it wrong, is that we have been focussing on whether this election means a change from two party British politics to three party British politics.

But, in fact, the election result reflects several other major changes in basic assumptions which have dominated political thinking.

First, Britain’s shift towards Presidential style US politics. Thanks particularly to the enormous success of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, who have used television to speak directly to the nation, both the cabinet and parliament has lost effective power. Indeed, many of the failures of Gordon Brown arise from the fact that he was not very good at addressing the nation  via television. He lacked the charisma of Thatcher and Brown.

Yesterday, Clegg and his aides, were having to listen, to their party leaders and MPs to decide what they could or could not offer the Cameron. No doubt Cameron was doing the same thing. And on Monday evening Cameron will have to get the support of his MPs for a deal with the Lib Dems, if one has been agreed with Clegg.

Second, the reality of Europe. Though this election has taken place when the Euro is under immense strain thanks to collapse of Greece, Europe is not going to collapse. Both legally and practically, the next British government will have to co-operate with Europe. This weekend the most Eurosceptic party, which at present is allied to the extreme rightwing and powerless  minority is considering a coalition with the most emphatically pro-European party.

Third, everyone agrees that the priority for our next government is dealing with the financial crisis. But most of the commentators have forgotten that this particular financial crisis  has been caused by the behaviour of big business in general and the banks in particular. American consumer capitalism has to change, and is already changing, with President Obama, working doggedly on changes that are quite as far reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

There are other major changes I could mention but that is enough for one blog.

My head still thinks that a Tory Lib Dem pact is extremely unlikely. And if it is proposed I shall be using my head to assess how long it will last. But my gut feeling is that it is happening, even as I write. And that we might all wake up on Monday morning, with a new government which is strong enough to last four or five years.

All of the British media, not just the right wing majority, pandered to fears that Britain that the British working class would demonstrate it’s supposed rascism, by voting for the BNP and UKIP.

They could not have proved more wrong.

Margaret Hodge, fighting a constituency, which was was considered such rich territorry for the rascists, with an immigrant probleem on top of serious economic problems arising from the decline of traditional industries, scored one of the most notable triumphs of 6 May 2010.

Her constituency was considered such fertile ground for the BNP, that their leader stood against her. She demolished him. Not only that the effect of her campaign vanquished the BNP gains in the local elections.

The fears of the Oxbridge toffs, both left wing and right wing, who write the articles in the mainstream media were proved unjustified.

Were proved plain wrong.

Many midland seats, including Wolverhampton South West, from which Enoch Powell, made his famous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, which is still remembered by the Oxbridge toffs. And by me, because my first experience of politics was canvassing for Powell in the 1950 election.

When immigration was not an issue in Wolverhampton, because the solitary ethnics were the Chinese laundry, whose child was in my class at school.

Powell pandered to working class fears, when mostly West Indian immigrants came to the Midlands to do the dirty jobs is the prosperous Midland industries, mostly linked to motor cars, whose profited when Harold Macmillan took over from the Labour postwar governments, and ushered us into the joys of US consumer capitalism.

Fast forward to 2010, when the people in my home townn, enjoy curry. Unlike my family who complainend of the smells ushering from the houses of their new neighbours.

The midlands these days is worrided by the lack of jobs, which afflicts the blacks and browns as well as the whites.

They don’t feel any gratitide for Blair or Brown, who have have been cosy cosy with the City and the bankers and the Murdoch empire.

These days the cars are made eastwards, in China and Taiwan. And the money was made to fuel the Blair/Brown prosperity by the men in suits in the City of London.

Who screwed up.

This time around they have voted for Cameron, not Brown.

Not because of the immigrant hordes in their streets. With whom they have mostly become friendly.

But because Blair and Brown have done nothing for them.

The mainstream media has missed the most important message of the verdict of the British electorate. British democracy is re-juvenated. They voted.  And they voted for a hung parliament. In very large number, more than twice as many as the one third of the US electorate who gave George W Bush his one vote triumph  which led to the Iraq war, which Labour’s Tony Blair joined in on.

They voted for a hung parliament.

Despite the pleas of David Cameron, amplified by the right-wing press.

Unmistakeably they told Gordon Brown that they wanted him to go. Forget the problems of our electoral system. The popular vote gave Cameron two million more votes than Brown.

They also gave an emphatic thumbs down for Nick Clegg. Despite the enthusiasm generated after the first TV debate, when he emerged into the limelight as  the one politician, who seemed honest, who was offering something differrent.

They gave him fewer seats. More important the popular vote gove the Lib Dems 23 per cent, no more than they have achieved before Cleggomania hit the nation.

Not because they are stupid. Not because they don’t think he might have made a better prime minister than Cameron or Brown.

But because they recognised that the best the Lid Dem could hope for, was as a junior partner with  Labour or the Conservatives.

Brown is absolutely right to stay in Downing Street. And wait while Clegg and the Lib Dems, decide, whether they will accept David Cameron’s offer to co-operarate with them.

Meanwhile running the country.

He is on much more shaky ground when he asks them to consider an alliance with Labour, under his Premiership.

The electorate has rejected him. Many of his own cabinet colleagues think he should have gone before this election.

But a Lib Lab pact is not even on the agenda.

It would require either Labourr agreeing to a government, with Clegg as PM, which the Labour Party would not agree to.

Or a government with a new Labour leader. But within the Labour party there is no agreement as to who that leader should be. Should it be Ed Balls, who is hungry for the job. Or the avuncular Alan Johnson.

Labour does not know. And the credibility of Labour, on building a  case for another Labour government, led by someone not elected by the voters, is zilch.

So Clegg needs to realise, right now, that he is NOT the kingmaker.

The electorate would only go on respecting him, if he was the Prime Minister in a Lib Lab pact.

Which is not a realistic possibility.

His choice is whether to help Cameron in his supposed government which will put the interests of the country above those of party.

Or whether to accept the verdict of the electorate.

Give Cameron his chance to solve our economic problems.

But don’t accept the Cameron shilling.

Cameron policies are based on proctecting the rich in the cuts we will have to face. Not just the middle class but the super rich.

That is not fair.

Because it is the greed of the super rich, which has caused our present crrisis.

If he wants a fairer society, which I believe he does, he should stay on the opposition benches, and oppose Cameron when he tries to make the poor suffer for the problems caused by the super rich.

And when he seeks to protect the rich even more by his proposals on inderitance tax.

It was economic worries which halted the Lib Dem surge so dramatically last night. The evidence was there in the opinion polls this week, which showed Lib Dem support sliding day by day as all the media focussed on the collapse of the Greek economy, the fears that Spain and Portugal might be the next to go, and the fears that the threat to the Euro would worsen the already grave international financial crisis. The share of the national vote in the Guardian/ICM poll, published yesterday morning showed the Conservatives on 36 per cent, Labour second on 28 per cent and the Lib Dems third on 26 per cent.

This is very similar to the actual result this morning with less than a hundred seats still to be declared. The Conservatives were leading with 36 per cent, Labour had 29 per cent and the Lib Dems 23 per cent. For most of the week the headlines have been dominated by the Greek story at the expense of the election. The media’s job after all is to cover events. But the effect was amplified by the way the Tory press amplified the story.

The Daily Mail led the way. On Wednesday it urged the voters to

Vote DECISIVELY to stop Britain walking blindly into disaster

The headline was topped by a Mac cartoon showing Brittania marching towards the edge of a cliff, with trident, shield and walking stick.

On polling day the Mail had a huge picture on the front page showing riots and the streets in Athens with fires burning. This kind of coverage not only helped boost the Tory vote, but it helped to save Labour from finishing third in the poll, because even the unpopular Brown looked a safe pair of hands, with highly experienced ministers, compared with the Lib Dems, who have only two or three on their front bench with any ministerial experience at all.

Because of the electoral system this slide in the votes had a devastating effect on Lib Dem seats so that it now looks as if they will end up with six fewer seats at 55 compared with hopes two weeks ago of topping 100.

Nick Clegg admitted to being disappointed by the result, which must be the understatement of the year. But paradoxically it may yet result in them have a part in the Government.

Just what is going to happen now is not at all clear, so will be the subject of my next blog.

Meanwhile I report that Peter Mandelson was beaming on this morning’s television. No Cheshire cat could match his smile. We may end up with a Lib Lab pact, a commitment to a referendum on electoral reform and a caretaker Labour premier. On Cameron may take power, although it much more difficult for him to come to any agreement with the Lib Dems.

And because the Conservative lead is so small the other parties are suddenly very important. The Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the first Green MP and the Alliance victor in Northern Ireland.

…….unless you are very rich indeed.

Like Oliver Letwin, the candidate in my own constituency of West Dorset. Who not only collects his parliamentary pay and expenses, but a salary from merchant bankers, N M Rothschilds.

One of the many bankers who have got rich under Thatcherism and even richer under the New Labour of Blair and Brown. o

And one of the many bankers who have prospered on the belief that the best managers are those who demand salaries 81 times the national average.

They have fostered a society in Britain and the US and the world, which panders to greed.

New Labour has made it worse, by sayinig that it is OK for public workers to be greedy too.

And which has operated from the belief that the greediest managers are the best managers.

For which their is no evidence at all.

The bankers N. M. Rothchilds, are the very firm which in 1965 fuelled the career of one Robert Maxwell, the first protagonist of New Labour, who was convinced that he could became a Labour Prime Minister, who  would rule with the consent of the capitalists.

Before that happened Maxwell was exposed as a crook, enabling his not crooked opponent, Rupert Murdoch, to grab control of a chunk of the British press.

Maxwell was disgraced, and his arguments to me in the years of his disgrace were that he was no more crooked than the City bankers who were pouring shit on him.

Those same City bankers resurrected him. So despite the fact that the UK regulatory system had deemed him unfit to be the director of a public company, he rose to greater heights and became the boss of the very powerful International company. Which he messed up. And tried to save by stealing the funds of the employee’s pension fund.

Not a businessman whom David Cameron would be proud of.  They prefer Lord Ashcroft, who is a different character. But who shares one characteristic with Maxwell.

He avoids paying his British taxes by routing his income via foreign companies.

No British politician has got to grips with this reality.

Because, fast forward to 2010, the crook, Robert Maxwell, has been proved right. One of the most respected of the world’s merchant bankers, Goldman Sachs, is currently in the dock, accused of crimes far worse than Maxwell’s.

In the US, President Obama is trying to change this world society based on the notion that the most greedy are the best managers.

In Britain, both Cameron and Brown toady up to the most greedy.

Only the Lib Dems are arguing for a fairer society, which is not controlled by the most greedy. And not dominated by the belief that greed is not what it is.

Possibly the most serious of the seven deadly sins.

And possibly the least rewarding.

Even Tony Blair, who has satisfied his own greed to the extent of £10 million or so, today looks much unhappier than when he was our prime minister, working for what, in terms of our present breed of greedy managers, is peanuts.

The one thing that all  three big parties and the opinion polls are agreed on in this most unpredictable general election is that the voters want a change after thirteen years of New Labour. Even Gordon Brown is promising that if he continues as Prime Minister, he will be a different Gordon Brown, a man who has learnt from his mistakes and will do better in future.

The latest poll shows the Conservatives on 33 per cent, the Lib Dems on 29 per cent and Labour on 27 per cent. But the pollsters are warning that their results leave the election wide open. Some thirty per cent are undecided. There are lots of new voters whose behaviour is not predictable on past results. And no-one can be certain as to how many will actually vote tomorrow, and how many will stay at home, because of disenchantment with Labour and scepticism about all politicians after the MP’s expenses scandal.

Moreover, a national vote at around these levels could result in a parliament in which Labour had the most MPs, the Conseratives a few less, and the Lib Dems just short of 100 MP’s.

Yesterday, Shirley Williams, now free to speak her own mind because as soon as Brown called the election, her job as advisor to his government ended, addressed this point first.

No party will win outright. We have seen the mold shattered. I don’t think any government will be able to stop a change in our voting system.

Williams then went on to address the biggy. The fact that whoever forms the next government will have to take drastic action to deal with the huge national debt and to deal with it in such a way that does not threaten the recovery from recession, and which does not split the nation and provoke the protests on the streets that Greece is now experiencing. According to Williams the Lib Dems

 ’will take account of the views of the British people’.

Sounds a bit woolly. Though not as woolly as David Cameron’s Utopian dream of the Big Society.

How will the Lib Dems do that?

We will put Parliament, which has been weakened, back in the driving seat.

In other words, not by doing what the Conservatives and Labour mean by firm government, imposing their policies, even though only a minority of the electorate has voted for them. But taking into account.

But the Libs Dems believe that the first act of the new government to deal with the economic crisis is to set up a Council of experienced practioners, including the Governor of the Bank of England. This body will be asked to quanify how much money needs to be saved to avoid the country going bankrupt.

The government will then make the polical decision as to how much these savings are made by increasing taxes and how much in cuts in public services, putting people out of work.

Williams made it crystal clear that when it comes to the political decision the Lib Dems will protect the poor as much as possible.

People earning less than £10,000 will pay no tax at all. Giving them dignity. No means test. And saving on bureaucracy.

They will also ask the risk to share the burden.

In my working lifetime there has been a rapidly widening gap between the very rich and the average wage. It used to be 9 times. It is now 81 times.

Shirley Williams knows this, because one of her first jobs was a journalist on the Financial Times. She, like me, has been reading for 55 years – repeat 55 years – the arguments of business leaders, and the Conservative Party, that if we did not pay our business leaders the wage they deserved, they would emigrate and work for companies who would pay them ‘the going rate’.

In 1955 they said nine times more than the average wage was not enough. In 2010 the leader in the opinion polls, David Cameron, agrees with them. Not only is he listening to their advice, because after all they must be good, because they are paid 81 times more than the average, but they must be protected from inderitance taxes.

Not only must they be paid huge wages. But they must be able to pass on their millions to their children. Who might be totally incompetant  inadequates.

Neither Shirley Williams, nor myself, were surprised when Margaret Thatcher rewarded the rich and crushed the poor.

Both of us were gobsmacked when New Labour toadied up to the business leaders. New Labour meant, they told them, meant that they could go on getting richer and richer.

But - and on this the bickering Blairites and Brownites agreed - the public sector should also benefit from the huge salaries paid to ‘brilliant managers’. The only way that could be achieved was by paying the bosses in the public sector huge salaries as well. 

So under New Labour, not only did private sector bosses get bigger salaries, but the government paid huge salaries in order to make the public sector ‘efficient’, like the private sector.

Just how much public sector managerial salaries escalated I can illustrate from my own experience. My first Vice Chancellor at City University, Raoul Franklin,  did a splendid job of ‘managing’ the university. So much so that City University, London,  which most of my friends in the press  had not heard of in 1979, is now a force in the land.

It is way and ahead as the primary training ground for journalists. City journalism alumnae are now working in their hundreds, for tthe BBC, the Murdoch media and everyone else. Trying to tell you what is happening, within the restraints imposed by their bosses.

But mostly doing an honest job.

Meanwhile City University has had to hire a new Vice-Chancellor in the open competitive market.

So they are paying him more than three times the £90,000 Franklin got. Because the ‘open market’ has decided he is the ‘best’ manager and he would not work for anything less.

Is fact his skills are almost exactly the same as those as Franklin. He is a career academic, dedicated to his own discipline, but humble enough to devoting some of his time to what in the university world is called ‘admin’. Sitting on committees and helping to make decisions on the allocation of resources.

He has no training in management. He would be hopeless at managing Tesco, which requires quite different skills.

And he would not want to run Tesco. Because he likes his job in a university, where he communes daily with colleagues who are trying to expand people’s minds.

Rather than trying to expand their bellies.

Which has its own satisfactions.

He would do that whether he was paid £90,000 or £300,000.

Because in UK 2010 £90,000 is still quite enough to live on.

And because human beings are  not entirely motivated by greed.

The crime, and it is a crime, of George Bush’s US and Britain’s New Labour, Blairite and Brownite, is that it has fostered a society, based on giving the most greedy the rewards they ask for.

Despite the fact, that all the world knows, that the present financial crisis, which the whole world faces, as well as Britain and Greece, results from the behaviour of the most greedy.

In Britain and the US these greedy people have been bailed out by governments.

In the US President Obama has made it clear, that their behaviour needs to change.

The crisis we face was not caused by governments.

It was caused by the greed of the bankers and big busines bosses, who concentrated on making as much money as they could.

For themselves.

And for their shareholders.

They messed up in a quite spectacular way.

But they are still behaving as if they deserve ‘bonuses’. As if they deserve 81 times the average wage for wrecking the world economy.

In the space of just two minutes yesterday Baroness Shirley Williams explained just why Liberal Democrats have the best nuclear policy, not only to protect Britain but to play a effective part in international negotiations to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to destroy more of the existing stockpile of nuclear weapons, which are more than enough to destroy the planet.

We have the biggest chance for years to work towards nuclear disarmament. That’s because of President Obama’s work since he came to power. And because the Russian Presiident is also working towards the same end. The Salt negotiations on nuclear proliferation have now agreed a 30 per cent reduction in the nuclear armoury. We now have the opportunity of a real reduction of the nuclear threat, real chance to lift the nuclear cloud overhanging us.

Williams went on to explain why the Lib Dem policy of not rushing to commission a replacement for Trident will have precisely the opposite effect to the scare stories, put around by both David Cameron and Gordon Brown and amplified by the Tory Press.

If we ordered a Trident  replacement right now other countries will ask, why can’t we have nuclear weapons as well?

And the effect of that, according to Williams, would be undo all the patient negotiations, just at the time we are ‘on the edge of a possible breakthrough.

Williams then went on to demolish the scare letter to The Times by some retired intelligence and armed service chiefs. The signatories of the letter included those who went along with the belief that Sadaam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, which was the justifiation for George W Bush’s descision to start the Iraq War before the inspectors had finished their work in Iraq. At the time Bush and Blair went to war:

The inspection was 90 per ccent complete and no weapons of mass destruction had been found.

Williams spoke with calm conviction. She has been involved in these talks in the US and in Britain for several years. And of course she has had since June, 2007 the formal role in Gordon Brown’s government of advisor on nuclear proliferation.

In the last two weeks Brown has ignored the advice of his own advisor, just as Blair and Bush before him ignored the evidence of the inspectors in Iraq.  His Conservative opponent, in contrast, just has the wrong advisors, includiing the signatories of that letter to The Times.

Williams made her speech from an armchair in the not very big sitting room in Sherborne of  the West Dorset Lib Dem candidate to an audience of less than a dozen. Cup of tea in hand. But there was nothing cosy about her speech.

What a pity she was not saying the same thing to 9 million on national television.

Shirley Williams came to Dorset yesterday at a day’s notice to help the local candidate  Sue Farrell, who has a fighting  chance of over-turning the 2,500 of  David Cameron’s friend, Oliver Letwin, the author of the Conservative manifesto.

From  her armchair she also gave a ten minute summary of Lib Dem policies. Which will be the subject of my next blog.