Updated yet AGAIN - The David Cameron Confidence Indicator

"David Cameron has full confidence in...."


Survivors (so far)
Jeremy Hunt
Full confidence declared 28 June 2010
Full confidence declared again 24 April 2012
Still in office as Culture Secretary at time of going to press (clock ticking, though - might not see out the week, let alone the year).

Theresa May
Full confidence declared 7 November 2011
Full confidence declared again 20 April 2012
Still in office as Home Secretary at time of going to press.

Andrew Lansley
Full 'support' declared 15:13 7 February 2012
Full confidence declared again 14 May 2012
Still in office as Secretary of State for Health at time of going to press

Francis Maude
Full confidence declared 2 April 2012
Still in office as Cabinet Office minister at time of going to press

Baroness Warsi
Full confidence declared 27 May 2012
Still in office as Conservative Party co-chairman at time of going to press



Confidence lost
Caroline Spelman
Full confidence declared 28 June 2008
Replaced as Conservative Chairman 19 January 2009



Andy Coulson
Full confidence declared 11.25am 21 January 2011
Resigned as Comms Director 11:37am 21 January 2011

HRH Prince Andrew
Full confidence declared 8 March 2011.
"Stepped down" as trade envoy 22 July 2011

Chris Huhne
Full confidence declared 16 May 2011
Full confidence declared again 2.14pm 20 January 2012
Resigned 10:50am 3 Feb 2012.

Liam Fox
Full confidence declared 8 October 2011
Resigned as Defence Secretary 14 October 2011


Odds evenly split now - 50% of those currently declared to have the full confidence of the PM are still in office. Average time between declaration and departure - 122 days or 72 days if you count from Chris Huhne's second declaration of confidence. The record is likely to remain with Andy Coulson, who took just 12 minutes to lose the PM's confidence. Jeremy Hunt holds the record for the longest survival after confidence was first declared, which took less than two months of being in office.

Don't privatise our police

This year, you will get the chance to vote for a police and crime commissioner. Perhaps the key question to ask the candidates is their attitude to this vital issue - will they privatise great chunks of our police service?

Election 2012 Review

I know it has take a while to get around to putting this online, but here's my (usually) annual review of the election results. 

Last year, Labour in Birmingham thought that 14 net gains was a great result - and it was. To gain another 20 this year and take control of the City Council was a greater prize.

Labour remains the only party that represents the entire city - we had over 1500 voters in 38 of the 40 wards. By contrast, the Tories achieved that in only 19 wards and the Lib Dems in just 9. My stats only go back to 2002, but in simple voter numbers, this was the worst year for either of the opposition parties since then. Indeed, in two wards, the Liberal Democrats failed to break into three figures – unprecedented in my records. In Shard End, by the way, they didn’t run a candidate at all because of an administration error.

In vote share, Labour took just over half of the votes cast across the City, with the Tories not even getting a quarter and the Liberal Democrats languishing on 16%. When these seats were last contested, back in 2008, the parties were much closer. We had 30.1%; the Tories had 30.2% of the vote and the Liberal Democrats 23.2%. That was a pretty bad year for us, with the Tories gaining 6 seats and the Liberals holding all their earlier, post-Iraq gains.

Across the City, we saw a 14% swing from Lib Dem to Labour and a similar 13.6% swing from the Tories to Labour. Those figures mask some bigger changes, however. Swing of the night was hotly contested, with Washwood Heath narrowly beating Lozells with a thundering 34.9% Lib Dem to Labour swing, compared to 33.2%. And then, of course, we had the shock of the night with the rise of Cllr Pocock.  How many of you thought that 2012 would be the year that would happen? He engineered a 21.8% swing from the Tories in Sutton Vesey – the biggest swing from Tory to Labour in the City and a tribute to long term community campaigning. Either that or the people of Sutton Vesey got bored with seeing his name on the ballot paper and reasoned that electing him would at least force a change for the next four years. I've tried something similar in Acocks Green. 

Something to remember is that because we elect by thirds and the boundary changes forced a rare ‘all-out’ election in 2004, many of the opposition candidates this year were their most popular winners back in 2004 – often their most experienced councillors in each ward, which is why we also dislodged a number of cabinet members. I’m sure that will cheer Mike Whitby as he looks towards 2014 as the sole Tory in Harborne against two excellent Labour councillors.

While all parties lost numbers of votes compared to last year – I don’t think the weather helped anyone and there is some general dissatisfaction with all politicians – the Tories were particularly badly affected. Overall, votes were down by 21% year on year. The Liberal Democrats actually did rather well – only losing 14% of their vote from last year and we lost 16%, with the Greens around the average with a 22% loss. The Tories haemorrhaged 31% of their vote from last year – a precipitous fall and hardly a great first outing for their deputy leader and campaigns leader, Cllr Robert Alden. This year saw his father evicted from his previously secure seat. 

Last year, Cllr Alden was profiled in the Post and his quotes are instructive: 

He also accuses colleagues of sitting on their laurels, because the city council’s social services and housing have improved in seven years of Tory-Lib Dem control. “Candidates can’t expect the electorate to be grateful, they have got to keep on improving. We have to show how we can improve Birmingham. And highlight the differences between a Con-Lib Dem administration and Labour. Labour have the same faces and same leader as they did when they ran the council so badly a decade ago.”

He was, of course, right. Sadly, that was largely the campaign that they ran - neither party voiced a real alternative to the manifesto put out by Labour and they relied on a mix of rehashing their self-identified successes and harking back to a Labour party of the early 2000s in an attempt to scare the electorate. A Labour Group of 77 suggests that this didn't work. It would seem that despite his position, Cllr Alden's message didn't get through to large parts of the coalition. Even the Liberal Democrats - who threw everything at the campaign in an attempt to defend their remaining councillors - failed quite dismally.

Clearly, the national political situation helped us – we’re watching the decline of the Liberal Democrats to a position below UKIP in national polling and the utter incompetence of the government post-Budget helped tip the balance in some Tory seats that they might have held. However, don’t forget that each of these victories came because of re-energised campaigning across the city – by people on the phones and on the doorsteps. That can’t stop now. We have more seats to take in 2014 and we need to keep up the pressure on the opposition and to keep the message rolling - having positive things to say on the doorstep about the future rather than just whinging about the past proved very effective. 

In other good news, the BNP – although they fielded more candidates than last year – saw their vote share and total vote decline again. UKIP increased their city-wide vote share, but that is because they ran more candidates, not because of any real shift – if you look at the wards where they ran last year, their vote is largely unchanged, although it did bump up in Shard End, possibly they were used as a receptacle for a safe protest vote with the absence of the Liberal Democrats. The other major party of opposition, Respect, seems to be quiet for the moment with  no representation at all and will struggle unless Salma Yaqoob is able to return to health and the fight, although it seems to lack any serious figures apart from her in Birmingham. The loss of the mayoral vote will also deny her a shot at Hodge Hill or the mayoralty itself.  Similarly, the Socialist Labour and anti-cuts candidates made no real inroads. It seems clear that Labour has had some success in offering real opposition and a real alternative to the Liberal Democrat/Tory coalitions in Birmingham and nationally.

The Greens were the only other party to run a full slate of candidates and while their vote share remained static year on year at 4.5%, they also have the potential to become the home of the oppositionalist vote – the role that the Liberal Democrats used to fulfil. Just an aside – the Liberal Democrats were courting the Tory vote in wards that they held, sending leaflets targeted at Conservative voters warning them that a Tory vote would ensure they had a Labour councillor. I suspect that this may account for some of the Tory loss – in my own ward, I think that may have added about 100 votes to the Liberal Democrat tally. 

In 2014, we’ll be defending 21 seats, while the Tories will be defending 11 and the Liberal Democrats 8, so our chances for net gains are lower, but there are some obvious targets. We should be looking to clean up the last men (and women standing) in the seats that already have two Labour councillors: one is Conservative (Harborne) and five are Liberal Democrat seats (Acocks Green, Hall Green, Moseley & Kings Heath, Selly Oak  and South Yardley). Another three Tory seats have new Labour councillors this year, so we should be looking to put a second alongside them in 2014 in Bournville, Northfield and Sutton Vesey. And then there’s Weoley to avenge. 

Weoley was probably the toughest one on the night - Steve Booton lost by just two votes and that can easily be ascribed to the foul weather that afflicted the city on the day and also to the relocation of a polling station, which wrongfooted a number of voters who may have struggled to get to the new location. 

Holding all our seats and winning those would give us a Labour group of 87 – a tough number to overturn easily and enough to insulate Labour against a number of poor years. 

And if we fancy a stretch target, there's always Sutton New Hall. That only has a majority of 925 - well within reach of Team Pocock with two years to go.

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery

I noticed a while back that there is a Liberal Democrat parliamentary researcher who runs a website called politicalhack.org (clearly far too much time on his hands). I've had other things to think about - like winning elections.

What I didn't realise until today was that it was run by one Martin Shapland, who is an accredited parliamentary researcher for John Hemming. Some years ago, before the coalition, he expressed his reasons for joining the Liberal Democrats rather than Labour.

"We're furious. We don't have jobs, we can't afford housing, we're the first generation that has had to pay for university education directly, and we're not getting our money's worth. Meanwhile, we're struggling day-to-day to pay utility bills while MPs are spending our money on things we couldn't dream of buying."

Good to see things have changed since 2009 with his party in power. 


Anyway, keep up the good work...


(HT to @PaulSandars)

Quiet today, isn't it?

We all make mistakes.

Last year, Paul Tilsley went to the police when a Labour leaflet appeared in Hodge Hill without the usual small print - 'Printed and published by....' as required by s110 of the Representation of the People Act.

This year, Liberal Democrat candidates in South Yardley and Sheldon have both put out expensive, glossy leaflets, replete with photographs of them pointing at things and standing beside other things. Some of the pictures even include a lesser-spotted Vince Cable, the increasingly pointless Secretary of State, being shown things that the government hasn't yet worked out how it can sell off or close down.

Sadly, in their eagerness to rely on past performance as a guide to the future (and a matching unwillingness to talk about that future in any detail), the rubric has been missed off.

I trust that Paul will report his colleagues and their agents to the police forthwith.

You have a choice

Remember this from 2010? It proved sadly prescient. 

In the last 13 weeks of the Labour government, we added £15 billion to the economy, driving it to recovery. Since then, the recovery has flatlined. 

In the last 637 days of the Tory government, they have struggled to add £5 billion. 

In the seven quarters since Osborne took the helm of the economy, aided by the useful idiot Danny Alexander, the economy has gone backwards in four. The fantasy of an export-led recovery, as seen in Canada in the 1990s has been exposed as the pipe-dream it always was.

However, the problem isn't the technical recession - I can assure you that out there in the real world, it has felt like a recession for a long time. Perhaps even recession isn't the right word - we're just bouncing along the bottom. I'd expect a pickup over the summer, but not by much and ongoing sluggish growth and contraction.

As I noted here, the recovery - such as it is - has taken longer than in any recession on record, including that in the 1930s. A far better qualified economist than me, the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, makes exactly this point - that this was a choice not enforced upon us by the bond markets or the European Central Bank and adds a warning:

The defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here. 

The private sector has not stepped up to the plate to replace the contracted state - and there are lots more cuts to come. 

The fact is, this is a depression manufactured in Downing Street by an utterly incompetent government. They try to shift the blame onto the Eurozone, ignoring the fact that up to 2010, the Eurozone and UK recoveries were tracking nicely together. After the May election, they diverged as the UK recovery stalled. 

The figures hide the fact that it is ordinary people and families that are suffering in this depression. I'm certainly not celebrating this awful news. 

However, we need to remember that in 2010, people had a choice about which road we would follow. 

They have a choice again on May 3. 

Out of ideas - or not in power?

Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP, is spot on when he claims that the civil servants are too heavily influencing policy.

The Pasty Tax has been floating around government for years - the Treasury have wanted to close this little apparent anomaly for years, but it has been batted back by ministers who were well aware of the consequences.

Is this evidence of an ideas vacuum at the top of government or political laziness on the part of the PM's office?

At first glance, equalising the VAT regime between your local chip shop and the large chain stores seems to be a sensible idea, until you look at how it will be enforced and managed. If I pick up a hot chicken in Asda and it has cooled to ambient temperature by the time I get to the checkout, is that due VAT? How will HMRC know how many pasties are sold hot by Greggs and how many have cooled by the time the customer hands over their cash? These aren't minor problems - they are the stuff of extended VAT litigation (and if you don't believe me, remember that McVities went to court to prove that a Jaffa Cake is, in tax terms, a cake and not a biscuit).

Before the budget, some commentators were worrying that Osborne was almost too politically savvy - but the record since has been an unmitigated disaster, a roll call of misjudgements, miscommunications and extraordinarily poor decisions taken without concern for the consequences.

I don't think that this is laziness - I think we're seeing the evidence that this government lacks a political direction or a basic set of principles that can be used to guide it. Perhaps this is a problem of coalition, but it does not bode well for the next three years to the election. A political compass provides a sense of direction in even the roughest political weather and Cameron's is shown to be distinctly faulty.

Runners and Riders

And so they saddle up officially, get under starter's orders and are out of the stalls as the 210 riders in competition for 40 seats in the grand council chamber in Birmingham's Council House set off across the fences towards the finish at 10pm on Thursday 3 May (although stewards' enquiries are unlikely to produce results until 2am on Friday, according to council staff).

From my reading, three parties offer a full slate across the city - Labour, the Conservatives and the Green Party. For some reason, there's no Liberal Democrat candidate in Shard End, but whether this is lack of a willing volunteer to surrender themselves before the Labour onslaught or some mistake in the paperwork isn't clear (the Tories failed to field a candidate in an unwinnable ward a few years ago, largely as a result of an error in nominations, I believe). UKIP are visible in 19 wards, the BNP will bring their jackboots into 17 contests (with their counterparts the National Front making cameo appearances in 4). Returning to the 80s, we get the retro-chic of 4 Social Democratic Party candidates on the ballot paper. 2 Communities against the Cuts campaigners appear, along with one Trade Union and Socialists Against Cuts candidate and 2 Socialist Labour candidates - who may be more closely related than the party names suggest. Oscott gets the pleasure of our sole English Democrat candidate and Aston gets the unique privilege of an independent candidate.

Acocks Green (where I declare an interest) appears to have the widest choice of any ward in the City, with eight candidates on the ballot paper - including my next-door neighbour as the Green Party candidate.

Some farewells are on the cards this year - former Lord Mayor Cllr Michael Wilkes (LD) chucks in the towel in Hall Green, being replaced by the losing Liberal Democrat from last year, which should make that seat one to watch. Geoff Sutton (Con) has decided to hand over the Tory baton in Kings Norton to Barbara Wood, who will face the full onslaught of two Labour councillors driving to put a third into the ward. The much respected Don Brown has finally stood down in Lozells and E Handsworth and is likely to be replaced by Mahmood Hussain. A couple of Sutton Coldfield seats are going to see new councillors in place - Peter Howard and Dennis Birbeck in Four Oaks and New Hall are off and Meirion Jenkins and Guy Roberts are stepping up to try to stem the inevitable rise of Labour. Incidentally, Meirion was the Tory parliamentary candidate in Yardley in 2010 and made a decent fist of a tough gig, with a better Conservative campaign than we've seen for a while.

I think most dispassionate observers expect Labour to win a solid majority this year - certainly the media expect it, following last year's gains. We're only defending 9 seats (including Sparkbrook which is Labour by defection) and the remaining 31 are Lib Dem or Conservative. In a number of seats - Kings Norton, for example - we already have two councillors, which should give Labour the advantage on the ground. In others, the Liberal Democrats can expect to see continued pressure - Martin Mullaney is under real threat in Moseley and Kings Heath this year and it would only take a 2.2% swing (based on 2008 figures) for that one to come to Labour. Some Tories appear to have thrown in the towel - Graham Green in Oscott has been giving excellent value in council lately, having thrown off all hope of winning and decided to go all out for entertainment value.

I'm shying away from predicting specific seats - not from any fear of being wrong, but I'm not going to have anyone accuse me of dismissing the campaigns of my colleagues across the city. I've fought unwinnable seats before and they deserve better from me than just writing them off publicly, so I will wish all Labour candidates the best of luck from me for May 3. I'm certainly not going to predict the outcome in Acocks Green, other than to say that it is going to go down to the wire - it will be very close. It is interesting that the Liberal Democrat candidate in Acocks Green - the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrat group, no less (and receiving a small allowance for holding that exalted office) - has largely debranded his campaign. The last round of Lib Dem leaflets did not include the yellow bird and hardly mentioned the party. In fact, his latest letters going out to voters only include the words 'Lib Dem' as part of the 'printed and published' small print at the bottom of the reverse page.

Prof Robert Winston puts the surgical boot into the Tories

An excellent party election broadcast from Robert Winston. Quietly devastating.

Eric's scheme flops

Back in February, I wrote about Eric Pickles' attempts to return to the days when every Englishman could have the remnants of his chicken curry collected on a weekly basis. I predicted then that few if any councils would consider restarting weekly collections, as the funding would only last for three of the five years for which they are required to sign up and that the money was insufficient in any case.

And lo, so it has come to pass. The Telegraph have been delving and so far, they report

• 96 councils are not applying for funds. Most of them have already abandoned weekly collections, and 58 of the 96 are Conservative authorities

• 34 will apply for money but only to introduce weekly food waste collections, or increase the number of homes covered, rather than bring in a full service

• 31 wanted money for plans which will do nothing to bring back weekly collections, including sat nav systems for rubbish lorries, more giant communal bins and even “nappy recycling” schemes

• two councils were in the process of ditching weekly collections — but were still applying to the scheme for funding for weekly food collections

• just 17 authorities which currently have full weekly collections said they would apply for money to guarantee their future.

Only Gloucester City Council will use the money to restore weekly waste collections. That will cover just 50,000 homes. 

Bradford West is Bradford West

One maxim to which I try to adhere is that an unusual result in a single poll is an outlier until something else reinforces it. For all the focus that the media - and politicians - put on by-elections, they need to be seen in the same context - they are singular beasts that often deviate from national trends. Peculiar results do not necessarily indicate a sea change.

The Tories failed to defend a by election on 15 occasions between 1989 and 1997 and didn't make a gain between then and 2008. You will notice, of course, that between 1989 and 1997, they still managed to win a general election. The Liberal Democrats have an enviable record as by-election winners, thanks to a dedicated campaign team that is spread too thinly nationally, but has historically come together to challenge even the safest seats, but have yet to form a government. Notably, the Lib Dems failed in Bradford - losing their deposit, although they didn't do too well in 2010, despite winning Bradford East in 2010. The Tories also suffered - losing 22 percentage points on their 2010 performance.

Then there is the Galloway factor. He is one of the few politicians who qualify as special cases in the UK - people who transcend traditional political rules - Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are similar, in that respect. I struggle to think of anyone else who could descend upon a constituency and repeat the Galloway effect - this vote isn't a general endorsement of Respect's carefully targetted populism, but a recognition of the star power of Galloway, fuelled by an ego capable of powering Wales. He also has the ability to energise traditional non-voters - the Guardian reports a number of visits to a local college to fire up the student vote. Whatever your views on his politics, he is a very powerful candidate when in the right seat - although it remains to be seen if he can improve on his appalling attendance record when MP for Tower Hamlets. By that nature, i don't think that a putative Hodge Hill by-election this autumn would yield the same result - there's only one George Galloway and the evidence in Birmingham is that once their star player leaves, Respect falls to bits. Since May 2011, they have contrived to lose all three councillors in Sparkbrook - one in the normal electoral cycle in May, one as a result of Cllr Yacoub's resignation and a Labour gain in the November 2011 by-election and finally, one who crossed the floor earlier this year.

So, this is a special case - a by election with an exceptional candidate challenging the status quo, with apparent local discontent at the domination of village politics. Those claiming that this indicates a national failure on the part of the Labour Party are wrong - these are not circumstances replicated across the country - but it does demonstrate that we cannot afford complacency about our traditional vote nor believe that all those who oppose the coalition will come to Labour naturally. We need to offer a real alternative and not just rely on the natural turn of the political wheel or the happenstance of government incompetence.

This was a singular event, but we ignore the complexity and the lessons within at our peril.

Don't panic, but don't relax either.

Behind the pasties and petrol cans....

When we've finished worrying about the pasty tax or whether the Cabinet Office Minister can authorise us to store industrial quantities of petrol or diesel in our understairs cupboards, the economy is still looking in pretty poor shape. Not that this will come as any surprise to those of us at the very sharp end.

With today's announcement that Q1 and Q3 performance were both slightly worse than expected, the reality of an economy bouncing along around the edge of a double dip recession has been confirmed. The graph at left is from the FT Alphaville blog and shows the recovery rates from recessions - you can see that the current downturn, if measured from Q1 in 2008 is already deeper in terms of lost GDP and slower in terms of recovery than the typical recession from the last period of Tory government. It is also now convincingly worse than that of the 1930s and the trend isn't looking good.

If you look closely, you will see that after the precipitous fall during 2008 and early 2009, the economy started to recover, a recovery that ceased around Q3 of 2010, the point where this government's policies started to properly bite. Since then, we've stagnated, with quarters of slight growth alternating with quarters of slight decline. If the trend running when Labour left office had continued, we'd have returned to parity with 2008 about now. The most optimistic view, if steady growth returned, would see parity restored sometime in 2014, but you would need to show evidence that growth is returning.

It may be a warm spring, but it looks like it won't be a great summer.

Birmingham Lib Dems back West Midlands Police privatisation

At the meeting on the 22 January 2012 where the police authority agreed to push ahead with the worrying proposals to privatise parts of the police service - in partnership with Surrey. The Labour Group on the authority rightly has big concerns about what this means for policing in the West Midlands and nationally, as this is clearly a government-backed pilot. Currently, a broad range of services are up for consideration, although the Chief Constable has claimed that what is likely to be outsourced will be much less - but no business case has been presented to the authority prior to the request for expressions of interests. That lack of clarity is a considerable risk for policing and also, in fairness, to the businesses that might wish to bid for involvement, but won't have a clear idea how far their remit might stretch. Essentially, this looks to be tilted in favour of one of the massive players like G4S, who are now running Winson Green Prison - they took it over and promptly lost the keys and then seem to have handed it over to the local gangs.

Put simply, there is still no evidence that these proposals will increase efficiency or the quality of service or assurances about the impact on other partnerships with local forces. It is certainly true that with costs contractually fixed for whatever is privatised, then any further funding cuts could only impact on the front line officers on our streets - there would be no option. It is also odd that such a plan would be launched only months ahead of the election of the Police and Crime Commissioner. The Labour group, plus the independent chair of audit, did not agree that the proposal was fit to progress, but were outvoted by the rest of the authority, including Cllr Ernie Hendricks, (Lib Dem, Moseley & Kings Heath). Another vote to delay the whole matter until after the election of the Police and Crime Commissioner also fell - again Cllr Hendricks voted with the majority.

The best hope is that because of the timing of the process, the final decision will be taken by the incoming Police and Crime Commissioner, making that election in November one about the whole future of policing in the West Midlands.

Mayoral Referendum Booklet Launched

With a hat tip to Neil Elkes, here's a link to the booklet shortly to be landing on doorsteps across Birmingham.