Yesterday Guy Aitchison reported on the first London-wide meeting of campaigners for a "Yes" vote in the AV referendum.  But what have the No camp been up to?

Last week it was announced that Matthew Elliott, the co-founder and Chief Executive of the TaxPayers Alliance, had accepted an invitation to lead the No-2-AV campaign.  “The ‘Alternative Vote’ system would give people less control over the laws which govern their lives”, said Elliott in a statement released to the press.  “Prescribing the wrong medicine doesn’t make patients better, it makes them worse.”

The No campaign, however, is still in embryonic form – and as yet very little is known about the scale of the organisation or the level of support they can claim.  The campaign’s press officer acknowledges that they are “playing catch-up” with the Yes campaign, and says they are still in the process of “putting together a team.”

The first London-wide meeting of activists to fight for a "Yes" vote in the AV referendum took place yesterday evening in a crowded room in Bloomsbury.

The event, organised by Take Back Parliament alongside Unlock Democracy and the Electoral Reform Society, brought together around 100 people of different ages and political persuasions.

Should we be having a referendum on AV or is it a dangerous and pointless distraction? Anthony Barnett, who hopes for a Yes vote, locks horns with Jerome di Costanzo, a  French conservative of  Burkean instincts.

Jerome di Costanzo: The expected hung parliament wasn't a symptom of a sick democracy. The quick formation of a coalition government has proved the contrary. The FPTP voting system shouldn't be condemned. The vote was accurate in the sense that it illustrated the mood of the electorate -  “we don't know!” This referendum is irrelevant. It is pure "bougisme" - an expensive political entertainment.

Anthony Barnett: Oh, it’s sick alright. I agree that the Coalition has shown vitality and creativity. Especially in the Freedom Bill, rolling back the database state and protecting our liberty. But, it has only done so because there is a coalition. This is not thanks to FPTP as you claim, but because of a grotesque bias in the system. Had it been a fair version of FPTP the Tories would have had a commanding majority. In fact, in its present form (now being reversed) it gives Labour a 5 to 7 per cent advantage. If the same vote had been the other way around in May, Labour would have had a large majority - just as in 2005 when it governed without a coalition on 33 per cent of the vote. FPTP needs to go because it is intrinsically undemocratic.Thanks for introducing me to 'bougisme', the restless appearance of movement without change! I suspect you are right, the political class would like the referendum to be pointless. All the more reason for us to ensure it isn't.

Andrew Sparrow is posting more extracts from The Journey on the Guardian blog as he unearths them.  

There are some quite extraordinary passages.

On the much maligned but misunderstood figure of Dick Cheney, Blair writes:

He believed, in essence, that the US was genuinely at war; that the war was one with terrorists and rogue states that supported them; that it stemmed from a guiding ideology that was a direct threat to America; and that therefore the only way of defeating it was head-on, with maximum American strength, with the object of destroying the ideology and allowing democracy to flourish in its stead. He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all the surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas etc ... Of course, this attitude terrified and repelled people. But, as will be obvious from what I have written, I do not think it was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined.

This is an alternative, and some would say more honest, rendition of Blair's journey performed by artist Julia Brosnan.

Hat tip Gerry Hassan.

Mark Thompson is one of the few people to have been allowed two bites at the most prestigious public address that the television industry offers: the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, held over the August Bank Holiday weekend. In 2002, when he first spoke, he had just taken over as Channel 4’s Chief Executive. By the time of his reprise last weekend, he had completed six years as the BBC’s Director-General. The difference in tone is remarkable.

In 2002, Thompson had no difficulty in acknowledging that much of British television was “dull and mechanical and samey”, suffering from a creative deficit, culturally conformist, risk-averse in its scheduling, and lagging behind the US in key genres: “it’s odd how often when you’re looking for ambitious, complex and above all modern TV, you find yourself watching not British but American pieces: Six Feet Under, say, or 24.”

Most of the time the Daily Mail gets it very wrong, but like a broken clock that's right twice a day there are times when they are spot on. The paper's frontpage today, in response to the publication of Tony Blair's, A Journey, and the former PM's lack of contrition on Iraq, is one such occasion. I haven't read Blair's book (which originally went by the even more self-aggrandising title, The Journey) but I have read the extracts in the Guardian and the rather fawning interview by Martin Kettle. These are some first impressions.

Iraq

Although Blair saw the "disaster" of Gordon Brown coming, he informs us that he did not foresee disaster in Iraq following the US-British invasion. From what I can tell, the suggestion seems to be that this is a perspective only reached with hindsight, despite the many expert warnings of the potential for bloody resistance and ethnic conflict at the time and the judgement of the UK intelligence services that invasion would increase the threat of terrorism.

There is a fascinating post about AV on the blog of the right-wing think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (h/t Don Paskini). It provides a revealing insight into the attitude of some market fundamentalists towards voting reform and our democracy more broadly. The Alternative Vote is "not a good way to elect Members of Parliament who will support radical free-market economic reforms", the author warns, since this system requires politicians to build a broad base of support and attract second and third preferences and this is likely to disadvantage free marketers whose views enjoy limited popularity:

It seems we have reached the degree zero of Labour politics in Britain. Few on the Left lament the passing of 13 years of New Labour, in part because it was associated with an illiberal style of hectoring micro-management that repelled people of all parties. Labour needs a complete reassessment of its values and purpose. But it is just this, as Neal Lawson pointed out, that is difficult for those closely associated with the old regime. Labour politics in Britain is at a crossroads.

One starting-point for analysis is to ask what explains New Labour's illiberalism. At least three immediate reasons can be found.

First was the unholy alliance between media and government business managers, which reduced debate on policy detours (Iraq) into managing media reaction to the leader's gut instincts, and more generally corroded the process of policy deliberation. Government foreshortened into corporate-style monitoring of media-friendly targets requires an illiberal means of implementation.

Securing the State, David Omand, Hurst, hbk £25.0

Terrorism: How to Respond, Richard English, OUP, pbk £8.99

The two titles make the distinction: master spook David Omand’s book is essentially a practical treatise on state security in the UK, historian Richard English’s short book is wide-ranging and largely analytical. But the analytical and practical are of course interwoven and both authors highlight similar issues and mistakes in the response to Al Qaeda and, crucially, Omand’s framework for the state’s response to terrorism and English’s seven key action points coincide (see below), though Omand’s account contains fudges on issues that English doesn’t have to confront.

David Omand was the principal author of CONTEST (COuNter-Terrorism Strategy), the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy

We all know the ingredients of a classic MacTaggart.

First you need anger. If you can manage it, rage - though no one’s ever going to match Dennis Potter not just for eloquence and passion, but for sheer undiluted bile.

Next you need a villain. If you study the best MacTaggarts, there’s always a proper, black-hearted villain. Sometimes the villain is called Murdoch - though, fascinatingly the record suggests, never when the lecturer is called Murdoch himself. Occasionally, some would say not often enough, it’s Ed Richards. Once - we have Peter Bazalgette to thank for this one - the Professor Moriarty of British television turned out to be Lady Elspeth Howe and the Broadcasting Standards Commission.

In all the excitement about the “Hung Parliament” outcome to the Australian general election one important lesson for voters in the UK is in danger of getting lost. The results of the election demonstrate very clearly that the Australian Alternative Vote system – seen as the model for the proposed change to the voting system here favoured by the Cameron/Clegg coalition - is a million miles from producing a fair, democratic outcome which values all votes cast equally.

With all the votes counted in Australia there is no mistaking the dramatic increase in support for the Australian Green Party. For the first time ever a Green member has been elected to the lower house while there will be nine Green members of the Senate (the upper house). Moreover the new Green MP together with an new independent MP who has had close links with the Greens are playing a crucial role in deciding which party - Labour or the conservative Liberal/National coalition - will now form the next government in Canberra.

With the mood amongst sections of the Labour party turning hostile towards electoral reform, and the appointment of the combative Taxpayers' Alliance chief to lead the "No" camp, some people are already forecasting a defeat for AV in the referendum. Over at Liberal Vision, Mark Littlewood has listed ten reasons why the Yes campaign is "staring at defeat".  Some of the strategic political reasons he lists should definitely be a cause for concern for reformers, whereas others, relating to the organisation of the Yes campaign and the arguments for AV are wide of the mark I think.

Although it's still early days to be making any strong predictions, given most of the public won't have given the issue a moment's thought just yet, it certainly won't be the cake-walk it looked like it might be a few months ago when the referendum was announced and support for AV was about double that for first past the post in polls.

With the AV camp facing an uphill struggle, the New Statesman asked for a piece on the forces gathering to fight for a Yes vote.

The lack of sufficient places to accommodate over 180,000 prospective students has underlined, if there were to be any doubts, that the right of young people to undertake a University education when they want and studying their chosen subject has been revoked by the state. The reality has always been that some University applicants have not got onto to courses, even when they had the right entry qualifications. But New Labour’s investment in higher education saw an expansion of the numbers of young people studying at University – not always on the course or the institution of their choice – that gave many young people the ill-founded impression of universality of provision.

In the midst of the overarching air of cuts-inspired gloom, the inability of large numbers of young people to get on a University course provides some early evidence of how the Coalition might seek to cater for young people in austerity UK.

The suggestion by David Willetts that those who were not accepted onto University courses this year should volunteer to enhance their chances next year was enlightening in a number of ways. For a ‘pro-business’ government who have placed their faith so heavily in the potential of the private sector to create employment, it was odd that Willetts did not suggest that, in the spirit of Norman Tebbitt, young people should ‘get on their bikes’ and look for work. This is most likely due to the slight chances that many would have in gaining full-time employment in these difficult times. The youth unemployment rate currently stands at 17%, double the national rate, with the long-term trend growing dramatically.

The Ghost, the film by Roman Polanski adapted from the political thriller by Robert Harris, is out from Monday 20 September on DVD and Blu-ray. This is a short extract from an interview by Martyn Palmer with Harris that its publicists have released.

Q: Talk me through your connection with Tony Blair. You were friends weren’t you?

A: Well yes, I suppose we were friends. I met him in 92, when he was Labour employment spokesman. We had lunch. We kept in touch. He became leader of the party.

Q: Were you still a journalist at that point?

A: Yes, I was doing a column for the Sunday Times. And his office - Anji Hunter (former Blair adviser) - rang me up saying he’d like to see you and so I said, ‘Ok, let’s have lunch ‘ and he came the next week. He obviously had ideas about what he’d like to do and he saw me as a like-minded journalist that he wanted to make his number with. Not long after, I gave up my column because Fatherland came up.  In fact, Tony came to the launch party for Fatherland in 1992. And I gave up journalism for a while because of writing that novel. Then he became leader of the party and I resumed my column on the Sunday Times and I used to talk to him quite often. And I saw him and travelled round with him in the 97 elections. And I think my wife and I were at the first dinner party that he and Cherie gave at Chequers after they won the election. Yes, so we were close. I liked him because he seemed a member of the human race, actually.  And he spoke sense. He was pragmatic. He was approachable.

I had my attention drawn this morning to a blog post by Jerry Hayes relating how, when he was a Conservative MP, he used to be "pimped" out by his party and sent to attend various functions where he would entertain party donors. The piece appears to be a response to the story in the Telegraph that a "Business Dinner" will be held at this year's Conservative party conference where, for a thousand pound a pop, a lucky few will dine with George Osborne and various "prominent Conservative MPs".  

Hayes portrays the people who turn up at these events as a mixture of eccentric old farts and bigots and the gist of the piece is that these affairs are all very innocuous and nothing to worry about. Now I understand it's humorous, but there's also something staggeringly complacent about this piece.

When I was first studying politics in the late 1970s, the very existence of Cabinet Sub Committees was a state secret.

We could only guess at how the ‘executive branch’ of government was being run. We used various leaks and published information about how Cabinets and Cabinet sub-committees in other countries worked.

The UK government eventually published a list of Cabinet sub committees, although the jury is still out on whether it ever has been a complete list, as the old committee numbering system appears to suggest.

The new UK Coalition Government has made major changes to the structure of the system that forms the interface between ‘democracy and bureaucracy’. Given that these changes were in no-one’s manifesto, and absent from any policy statement or Coalition Agreement. Given that there was no public debate about these major changes, one can only deduce the significance of these changes for the governance of the UK from the nature of the changes themselves and committee membership. (see table below).

"Greater transparency is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account." (David Cameron, May 2010)

Under the Conservative led coalition, ‘transparency’ has become the latest tool in a long-standing war against the state. The public sector, and the BBC in particular, have found their salaries and accounts under increasing scrutiny. But transparency is limited – there is still an area with over £200bn of public liabilities that is strictly off limits: the PFi contracts.

Speaking in May, the coalition announced plans to publish the names and salaries of any civil servant earning over £150,000, with the threshold falling to £58,000 by the end of the year. The Tory press have kept up the pressure with a stream of articles on high earning civil servants, senior NHS management and headteachers. Though varying in form, the message remains uniform throughout: the public sector is awash with wealthy bureaucrats bleeding the taxpayer dry. The narrative serves a crucial purpose: the coalition is about to embark on an ideological savaging of the state unmatched in recent times. The size and speed of the cuts go well beyond the realms of pragmatism. The story of public sector largesse is one they are desperate to reinforce; it is the vital prerequisite of the coming onslaught.

The disclosure by the Electoral Commission of donations to the political parties, which reached record levels in the quarter before the general election, has revived age old questions about party funding reform.

Of the £26.3 million-worth of gifts declared by 16 political parties in April, May and June, the Conservative Party received £12.3 million and Labour £10.9 million with the Liberal Democrats struggling to compete with £2 million. As ever, the Tories’ main source of donations was wealthy individuals whilst Labour received a mixture of funding from unions and individual donors.

Clearly something needs to be done about party funding. All three of the major parties have been caught up in funding scandals in recent years. But even when there is no outright scandal or suspicion of foul play it is contrary to democratic principle that wealthy individuals and organisations should hold such sway over the political process.

Two current news stories demonstrate why the current system is unsatisfactory:

Patrick Dunleavy has another fascinating post up on the LSE Politics and Policy blog in which he examines the future of the "Westminster model" in light of the recent Australian election which delivered a hung parliament in which neither Labour nor the Liberal-National coalition can form a majority.

Dunleavy observes that:

For the first time in history, the Australian outcome means that every key ‘Westminster model’ country in the world now has a hung Parliament. These are the former British empire countries that according to decades of political science orthodoxy are supposed to produce strong, single party government. Following Duverger’s Law their allegedly ‘majoritarian’ electoral systems (first past the post and AV) will typically produce reinforced majorities for one of the top two parties.