THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS INVESTIGATE

NICK CLEGG: Danny, I’ve heard rumours that Chris Rennard has been a bit naughty! Will you have a word?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Righto, Nick!

Later …
DANNY ALEXANDER: Chris, I’m told there are rumours you’ve been a bit naughty! Are they true?
CHRIS RENNARD: No, but I resign on grounds of ill health.
DANNY ALEXANDER: Splendid, Chris, I’ll pass that on!

Later still ... 
NICK CLEGG: Did you have a word with Chris?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Yes. He says there's no truth in the rumours and has resigned.
NICK CLEGG: Phew, that's a relief!

Some years later on TV …
MARGOT BONHAM CARTER (former Lib Dem candidate): That rotter Chris pinched my bottom! I told him off and then went home.
PAMELA ASQUITH (former aide to Nick Clegg): I felt his fingers fondly caressing my thigh as we discussed alternatives to the council tax after dinner at his flat. He was really creepy, so I immediately called a taxi back to Tooting.
MARIGOLD THORPE (Lib Dem leader of Pendon council): When he suggested we went upstairs for a 'pervy quickie' at the conference hotel, I burst into tears and ran off to my room.
ANONYMOUS (Lib Dem activist): I went over to his house to see his collection of Lib Dem Focus newsletters. But I thought he was revolting and left after a drink.

Back at Lib Dem HQ
NICK CLEGG: This is a crisis! We must make a statement! Danny, do you remember the rumours about Chris?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Rumours? I’m sure the first I heard was when Margot and Pamela went public on TV.
NICK CLEGG: Oh, I thought I heard something vaguely before and told you about it. Never mind! If we both tell everyone what we remember, I’m sure the truth will out!

NO LABOUR SELL-OUT ON LIBEL REFORM!

The threat Labour is posing to the libel reform bill is breathtakingly dumb and cynical.

It is a small piece of legislation that would curb some of the worst idiocies of our libel law – making it just a little more difficult for charlatans and foreign billionaires to suppress legitimate criticism – and was making its way through parliament with cross-party support.

Then up pop Labour Lords Puttnam and Falconer to amend the bill with a lot of proposals based on Lord Justice Leveson’s report on press regulation – which get the support of the Labour leadership. No matter that their proposals are utterly illiberal where they are not entirely irrelevant (they include the creation of a body that would vet material before publication, which is outrageous): they know that their action endangers the entire bill, because the government will withdraw support for it if amended. Indeed, the sole purpose of their intervention appears to be to embarrass David Cameron for wavering over Leveson.

There’s 24 hours for Labour to change tack and drop this opportunistic wrecking move: the Lords vote tomorrow. If Labour doesn’t withdraw, it will lose all credibility with journalists … and it wouldn’t want that, would it? Read Nick Cohen, John Kampfner and Tim Luckhurst.

IRAQ STARTED A DISMAL DECADE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 February

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth of the French revolution. “But to be young was very heaven!” And to quite a lot of people, the same seems to apply to having gone to the giant London demonstration of 15 February 2003 against British participation in the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

 I’ve lost count of the pundits who have told us how it changed their lives and opened their eyes and nothing was ever quite the same again. Yes, it was massive, the biggest demo in London maybe ever – 1 million, 2 million? No one knows. We came from all over, all sorts of people. It was an extraordinary mobilisation, and it felt good to be part of a giant crowd.

But that was it. We came, we hung around in office-land, we eventually got to Hyde Park. A month later, Robin Cook resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet and there was a backbench Labour revolt in the House of Commons. Then Britain went to war.

In short, the demo failed. OK, it might have been more effective – a Tory MP on the platform, perhaps, or a bit of direct action? – but the brutal truth is that a lot of us turned out to say we didn’t want war, and the government, which had won a big majority in 2001, ignored us, as was its democratic right.

So why is everyone talking about it ten years after? It’s not just the convenience of anniversaries for editors. Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, framed by the day of the protest, captures the unease that made the Iraq war a watershed for liberals and leftists. Should we be opposing the overthrow of the most murderous tyrant of the late 20th century? Or should we be backing an imperialist adventure that has every prospect of failing? It was a defining moment, and the arguments continue to this day, filled with passionate intensity.

At the time, it seemed that the scale of opposition to war might prove fatal to Blair’s premiership. But it turned out to be only a nagging wound for New Labour. For all the sound and fury, Blair won another general election in 2005, and Iraq played only a small role in the manoeuvring by Gordon Brown that eventually ousted him.

The war did, however, prove critical for the confidence and credibility of the left in the Labour Party. It was riven over the war but also committed to maintaining Labour in power. Cook’s resignation speech won a standing ovation in the Commons, but most Labour MPs who agreed with him stuck with Blair. Individual Labour Party members opposed to war drifted out of the party, and the anti-war cause became the property of the Liberal Democrats, the Leninist far left (the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Britain and George Galloway), the mosques with whom the far left had allied, and the Greens.

None of them managed to capitalise on the political collapse of the Labour left. The Lib Dems won 62 seats in the 2005 general election, the biggest haul for a centre party since the 1920s but only 10 better than 2001, then jettisoned two leaders before turning to the free-market right. George Galloway won Bethnal Green for Respect after a campaign directed at traditionalist Muslims, but Respect soon split after a bust-up between Galloway and the SWP. Galloway resurrected his Bethnal Green strategy to win a by-election victory in Bradford last year, but it’s hard to see that as more than a one-off. The Greens retained the European Parliament seats they won in 1999 in 2004 and 2009 and won representation on local councils, though it wasn’t until 2010 that they got their first MP (and that had little to do with Iraq).

Meanwhile, Labour lost power in 2010 to the most reactionary government we’ve had since the 1930s. Iraq was not a major factor in the defeat – at least by comparison with the MPs’ expenses scandal, immigration and the press trashing of Brown and Labour’s record on economic policy. But it was a factor, and it was an issue in the leadership election that followed. Ed Miliband won in part because, conveniently, he’d not had anything to do with the decision to go to war.

The war marked the start of a dismal decade for the British left. Can we move on, please?

MR CAMERON GOES TO AMRITSAR

The Amritsar massacre of 1919 is rightly remembered as one of the great outrages of the British empire in its twilight years. Brigadier Reginald Dyer, the local British army commander in the northern Indian city, nervous that the natives were restless and thinking they needed to be taught a lesson, ordered his troops to fire live rounds from rifles and machine guns into an exuberant but unthreatening crowd celebrating a Sikh festival. By the time Dyer’s men had exhausted their ammunition, at least 400 and perhaps as many as 1,000 of the revellers had been shot dead, with thousands seriously wounded.

It was not the only crime of empire or even the greatest – but it was the most brutal and public of the immediate post-first-world-war years, and the news of it, transmitted through the mass-circulation press, horrified Indian and most informed British opinion (to say nothing of the anti-imperialist Americans). Not so the British government, then a Conservative-Liberal coalition led by David Lloyd George, which procrastinated while inquiries and disciplinary procedures dragged on, eventually, more than a year afterwards, when it had no other option, putting up Winston Churchill, the most right-wing Liberal of the day, to explain in the Commons that it had decided that the massacre was a bad thing.

He did so reluctantly but well, against the protests of the Tories and their supporters in the press: it was the only time in the interwar years that Churchill did not take the most reactionary line available on India. The diehard Tory Morning Post, lately distinguished by publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as documentary evidence of the conspiracy behind Bolshevism, put the hat round after Dyer was disciplined to make sure he had a bounty when he got home, and Dyer remained a hero of the diehards until his death in 1927. Rudyard Kipling, who was of course much more than a diehard, said that Dyer had saved India.

In the circumstances, I think that anyone associated with the Tory party should be grovelling whenever they go to India. “I renounce my party’s despicable history, its tame press and the horrors of British imperialism” was not, however, the message that David Cameron gave when he sort-of apologised (by saying that it was rather awful but Churchill had said sorry already) this week.

WILKO PRAISES AAAARGH! PRESS TITLE

Anna Chen went to see the great Wilko Johnson this week -- and this is what he said about her book of poems (click on ad on the right to buy it!).

BRITISH LENINISM IS DEAD

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 January 2013

The economy is in free-fall, the government is stumbling from crisis to crisis, Labour is somnambulant … but what has the British left been talking about this past month? Online transsexuals bullying the feminist journalist Suzanne Moore about an article in the New Statesman – and an extraordinary bust-up in the Socialist Workers Party over an allegation of rape against a senior male member.

The storm over the ugly threats to Moore has had more media coverage – in part because Julie Burchill responded to them by accepting a commission to write an incendiary piece for the Observer lampooning what she called “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing”. Her article, which is very funny, was removed from the paper’s website by its editor, John Mulholland, after readers (and his editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger) complained – a quite astonishing failure of editorial nerve. I’m with Suzanne and Julie on this one: however misunderstood and oppressed you are, you don’t Tweet rape threats to the birds.

But the SWP sexual assault scandal has wider ramifications. The story is simple. Some years ago, a woman member of the party complained of sexual harassment by a party bigwig – and last year she accused him of rape. The party referred the case to its disputes committee, the members of which were friends of the accused; and the committee conducted a slapdash inquiry and found the accusation not proven. It then reported its verdict to a closed session of the party’s conference in early January – which voted to accept it, but only by the narrowest of margins.

Then the shit hit the fan. A transcript of the conference debate on the disputes committee report was sent to the Socialist Unity website by a party member disgusted by the leadership’s lack of openness on the case. This in turn was the cue for several resignations and a spate of polemics from suddenly dissident SWPers – prominent among them the writers Richard Seymour and China Miéville – loudly denouncing the party leadership they had supported unswervingly for years. The hypocrisy is breath-taking, but never mind. The SWP is now in what looks like a terminal crisis.

So what, you might think. But although the SWP doesn’t matter much, it does matter. Until this latest scandal, it was the sole survivor of the Leninist far left in Britain that could claim to be more than a website or a network of old comrades in their fifties with salaried positions in the labour movement, academia, the media and various pressure groups (though of course it was that too). Since the early 1990s the SWP has been the biggest faction on the far left in Britain (which isn't saying much: its membership is almost certainly less than 2,000).

It was a beneficiary of the implosion of its competitors. The Communist Party of Great Britain split during the 1980s. The Eurocommunist majority abandoned Leninism to create Democratic Left (which dwindled to nothing, changed its name twice and handed over what remained of the Moscow gold to a constitutional reform pressure group). The CPGB’s Stalinist minority regrouped in the tiny Communist Party of Britain, most of whose members are now pensioners. A little later, the SWP’s main rival on the Trotskyist left, the Militant Tendency, went into catastrophic decline after it was expelled from the Labour Party (except briefly in Scotland, where it was the core of the Scottish Socialist Party until its charismatic leader Tommy Sheridan fell from grace, though that’s another story).

During the 1990s, the SWP recruited a swathe of leftists left homeless by New Labour, and after Labour won in 1997 made an opening to its rivals, setting up a party to fight elections, the Socialist Alliance, with Militant (by then the Socialist Party of England and Wales), which contested the 2001 general election. The SA won nothing, and meanwhile the brains behind the SWP got old and died: Tony Cliff (2000), Duncan Hallas (2002), Paul Foot (2004).

The SWP terminated the great Trot love-in amid recriminations, but after 9/11, the SWP threw itself into anti-war activism – and found itself new allies in the form of the Muslim Association of Britain and the maverick pro-Saddam Hussein Labour MP George Galloway. The result, after Galloway’s expulsion from Labour in 2003, was the creation of another new electoral party, Respect, which did very well for Gorgeous George, who won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, but not so well for the SWP, which got few recruits from the initiative and a lot of ridicule for cosying up to barmy reactionary Islamists.

The SWP left Respect and jettisoned the two leading figures most responsible for the Islamist turn, John Rees and Lindsay German, who now run a website-cum-party called Counterfire. It was obvious when they left that the party was in trouble, but it still dominated the far-left scene: every union branch had a resident SWPer. Now the party is a laughing-stock: no one will even talk to them after all this. I’m not mourning, but it’s worth noting. British Leninism is finished.

EU SHOULD TELL CAMERON TO GET LOST

What the EU needs right now is more integration – a Eurozone-wide tax-and-spend regime to mitigate the impact of the single currency and democratic institutions to run it. David Cameron's proposal for Britain to become a free-rider with access to the common market but able to undercut everyone else on workers' rights and to evade regulation on everything from banking to the environment deserves nothing but contempt. Our European partners should – and probably will – tell him where to stick it. And we don't need a referendum on Europe, or indeed on anything else. Ed Miliband has called this one perfectly.

THE MAN WHO GOT IT WRONG

I've no desire to speak ill of the dead, but William Rees-Mogg, who has just died, was the Man Who Got Everything Wrong. He was a great modernising editor of the Times. More than anyone else, he turned it into a modern broadsheet paper between the late 1960s and early 1980s: it stopped being fuddy-duddy and dull and put on circulation.

But after he left the chair, is there anything he got right? His columns in the Independent and later in the Times were fuddy-duddy and dull and became a laughing-stock because of his enthusiasm for ill-informed predictions – Private Eye taunted him as "Mystic Mogg" – but they never went away. He was wrong about everything imaginable, from the state of the world economy and other geopolitical issues right down to the minutiae of arts policy, and was wrong so barmily and systematically that his column became a must-read for anyone with a taste for comedy. We need another chief establishment chump, and we need one now.

REMEMBER WHAT WE DON'T KNOW

Can you imagine what it's like to be in the bunker with Bashar Al-Assad? I can, but it's not journalism. As his regime crumbles – or does Russian military aid keep it going? – all the user-generated-content new-media palaver shows only that his regime is brutal and cynically prepared to do anything to stay in power. We've got more pictures than we're used to. Some of them are shocking. But are we any better informed about what is actually going than the outside world was in 1917 about the October revolution in Russia? We're not, and technology will never replace journalists on the ground. Where is the correspondent with Assad's ear?

DEVIANTS LAUNCH NEW BOOK IMPRINT

Aaaargh! Press, a new Brit alternative small press, is celebrating its birth with a party in London next month to mark the publication of its first titles, Reaching for my Gnu by Anna Chen (Kindle e-book and paperback) and The Guitar Geek Dossier by Charles Shaar Murray (Kindle e-book only for now).

Reaching for my Gnu, a collection of poems by British-Chinese poet and performer Anna Chen is available as a paperback here for £9.99 and as a Kindle e-book here for £1.99.

'Brilliant and dangerous ... one wild-ride roller-coaster that soars to altitudes of unfettered wit and then plunges with a startling and implacably knowing anger' MICK FARREN

'Superb' GREG PALAST

'Charming, witty and sophisticated' SUNDAY TIMES

The Guitar Geek Dossier, an author's-choice collection of columns from Guitarist by legendary music journalist Charles Shaar Murray is available as a Kindle e-book here for £1.99.

'The Johnny Cash of rock journalism' PHIL CAMPBELL, MOTORHEAD

'The rock critic’s rock critic' Q MAGAZINE

'Front-line cultural warrior' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Charles is author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (both Canongate). His first novel, The Helhound Sample, was published by Head Press in 2011.



The details of the launch party, which will be something to remember, will be posted here and on the official Aaaargh! Press website very soon.

CENSUS LATEST

We're winning! "No religion" up from 15 per cent in the 2001 census to 25 per cent in 2011! 

BY-ELECTION FOOTNOTES

A few points to add to what has already been said elsewhere:

1. As everyone says, the Croydon North, Middlesbrough and Rotherham by-elections were good for Labour (as indeed were Cardiff South, Corby and Manchester Central earlier in the month) – but it wasn’t just because Labour won what had been safe seats. Most importantly, in Rotherham and Croydon North it saw off what ambushed it in Bradford West, a populist-left challenge from Respect, and it did so convincingly.
2. Respect was written off by most commentators after the 2010 general election – but it sprang miraculously from the dead when George Galloway won Bradford West in March. It is not going to get a better shot at replicating that than Rotherham – a disgraced Labour MP, a large Muslim population, momentum from Bradford West. But it failed. Its performance (just over 8 per cent for Yvonne Ridley) was good for a far-left party historically (anything over 5 per cent is) but poor given everything that it thought was going in its favour. And 707 votes for Lee Jasper (and sixth place behind the Green) in Croydon North was risible. Respect is now nothing more than George Galloway’s personal political machine.
3. UKIP did well, but the hype should be kept in perspective. New insurgent parties have actually won by-elections in the past rather than celebrate their best performance as coming a distant second with 22 per cent of the vote. UKIP has a long way to go before matching the Scottish National Party in Motherwell in 1945, let alone the Social Democratic Party in Crosby in 1981.
4. The real danger from these by-elections is that they encourage Labour to adopt an even more opportunist populist approach to Europe and immigration than hitherto because that’s where the voters are. In Rotherham, more than one-third of those who voted chose candidates to the right of the Tories on Europe and immigration – and Labour’s focus groups are jammed with people moaning about bloody foreigners coming over here from eastern Europe, taking our jobs and houses and scrounging on the dole. The Labour leadership is of a generation that listens to the focus groups then works out what it believes – and Ed Miliband, despite his coherent though hardly inspiring speech in favour of remaining part of Europe the other week, has not broken the habit of telling people what the focus-group analysts think they want to hear. I’m afraid I expect a lot of Labour attempts to hijack UKIP themes over the next few months.
5. It's utterly disgraceful that there was not a proper by-election news programme on the BBC last night or for the previous round of by-elections. If the public service remit of the BBC means anything, it is that it reports the proceedings of British democracy. Last night, the Croydon Advertiser's blogger beat the BBC to the Croydon North result (though he or she got a lot of the figures wrong) and the BBC didn't run a comprehensive report on the results until 40 minutes after the declaration. It was better by far in the good old days of Vincent Hanna and sing-songs round the piano with Larry Whitty.

THE GUARDIAN NEEDS A PLAN B

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 November 2012

Management and unions at the Guardian and the Observer are set for an almighty confrontation after management this month announced the start of compulsory redundancy proceedings in order to get rid of 100 journalists out of 600-odd on staff.

Guardian News and Media management claims that it needs 100 to go to save £7 million a year – and that only 30 have offered themselves for voluntary severance. After years of job cuts that have seen some 250 editorial staff leave voluntarily, management says that GNM is losing £44 million a year.

GNM journalists say that the losses have nothing to do with editorial over-staffing and everything to do with a misguided commercial strategy. Rather than getting rid of journalists, they say that GNM needs to rethink its commitment to offering all content for free online and to reduce spending on exorbitant management salaries and expensive marketing gimmicks.

The Guardian is no stranger to financial crisis. Until the 1980s, it relied on a subsidy from its sister paper, the Manchester Evening News, to cover its losses – and in the 1960s its management got so jittery that they seriously considered a merger with the Times. Nothing came of it, the MEN continued to pay the bills, and the Guardian put on circulation and cornered the market in advertising for media and public-sector jobs. By the late 1980s, after production costs (and printers’ jobs) were slashed by the introduction of new technology, the Guardian was making money. For a good 15 years it enjoyed a commercial golden age. The Guardian Media Group bought the Observer in 1993 and took over Auto Trader, the profitable used car listing magazine, then in the mid-noughties paired up with a venture capitalist firm for a leveraged buy-out of the magazine company EMAP.

So what has gone wrong? The easy answer is the internet and recession. The internet allows us all to access what news we want online for free, so we don’t buy newspapers as much. It is also how we find out about jobs (and houses and cars) and increasingly how we buy consumer goods. All this means there’s less advertising for print publications. And in a recession advertisers cut back on spending and readers buy fewer newspapers.

This is a challenging environment for all newspapers. With print advertising and sales on the slide, they need to find new revenue streams. And that is what the Guardian has failed to do.

It embraced the internet early, and by 2000 its online audience was bigger than that of any newspaper in Britain – with the website attracting increasing traffic from the US. While other newspapers tried paywalls or limited access to their print versions, the Guardian made everything free to all. The hope was that before long the site would attract sufficient online ad revenues to make up for any fall in sales and print advertising.

But the online advertising has not materialised – or at least not in sufficient quantity. At which point, you might think, the old adage “If you’re in a hole, stop digging” might come into play. Not a bit of it. The Guardian management has stuck to plan A – pour money into online in the hope that web advertising comes to the rescue – with messianic zeal, declaring its strategy to be “digital first”, pouring cash into a new US office in an attempt to establish the Guardian as a genuinely global brand and embracing what editor Alan Rusbridger calls “open journalism”, roughly speaking the idea that the barrier between journalists and reader-contributors will be broken down by digital interactivity.

Its commitment was epitomised by its vastly expensive TV advertising campaign earlier this year, an animation showing a zippy online Guardian awash with user-generated content retelling the fairy story of the three little pigs. Much praised by the ad industry, it had no effect on print sales, but that didn’t stop the man behind it, David Pemsel, being taken on as GNM’s commercial supremo this autumn. Meanwhile, the message from the Guardian to advertisers remains that its online reach is stupendous – but advertisers just won’t pay very much for digital ads.

Of course, GNM needs to stop haemorrhaging money. But getting rid of journalists really isn’t the best way to do it. The work they produce is the main reason people buy the Guardian and Observer and visit the website – not the user-generated content or the dating agency or the coolness of the brand or the interactivity of the mobile apps. I’m not surprised that they’re up in arms and demanding a plan B.

HOW INDEPENDENT IS INDEPENDENT?

There are two big stories about the police and crime commissioner elections: the low turnout, and the success of 12 independents (out of 41 commissioners elected).

The low turnout is hardly surprising – but the success of the independents is, at least on first sight. Other than in local elections in some rural areas where "independent" means "Tory by another name", independents win UK elections only in freakish circumstances.

So why the 12 independent successes in the PCC elections? What's common to all of the independents is the pledge to keep politics out of policing. As any Marxist fule kno, that's a false prospectus, because  policing is intensely political: you can't take the politics out of decisions about how to police industrial disputes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, immigration, terrorism, hate speech, state secrets, drugs, business malpractice, domestic violence, prostitution, deviant sexualities, you name it. The problem, of course, is that most people aren't interested in this sort of stuff most of the time: they just want the cops to stop other people nicking and damaging their personal possessions and behaving in violent and threatening ways towards them. What could be political, let alone party-political about that?

So that's the appeal, and with very low turnout the independents tapped into the common sense of prioritising  stopping the stuff everyone wants stopped, with varying degrees of genuflection to social inclusivity and due process.

But the independents aren't really very independent. There's at least one former Tory and one actual Lib Dem among them, and nearly all have been cops, magistrates or members of police authorities. They are policing insiders to a man and woman – as indeed are most of the Labour and Tory PCCs elected on Thursday – and it's difficult to imagine them playing any roles other than cheerleading for their chief constables or populist showboating. Would any of them have stood up to denounce systemic corruption in the Met, or the Hillsborough cover-up, or Orgreave? If police accountability is the goal, this isn't the way to do it.

UNIVERSITIES: A CASE OF MARKET FAILURE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 November 2012 

It is, I admit, difficult to feel sympathy for the Russell Group of elite universities. Its 24 members – Oxford, Cambridge, most of the University of London and a handful of other institutions, which between them scoop up more than 80 per cent of higher-education research funding – have a deserved reputation for special pleading. The Russell Group universities enthusiastically embraced Labour’s introduction of student loans and the current coalition government’s move to make higher education entirely student-debt-funded by hiking fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year for undergraduates.

We’ll be all right, they said, and sod the rest. But now, it seems, they’re starting to have second thoughts. Last week, the director of the Russell Group, Wendy Piatt, told a BBC Radio Four documentary that its members have taken a hit of £80 million in lost income because of the shortfall in student recruitment caused by the increase in student fees.

And if they’re hurting, just think of the non-elite universities. The Russell Group have been the main beneficiaries of the government’s decision to relax recruitment controls and allow higher education institutions to recruit as many students as they want with top A-level grades.

The recruitment figures for “post-1992” universities – the former polytechnics – are not yet available. But all the anecdotal evidence suggests a slump in numbers that threatens the viability of many courses and departments. Universities are in crisis as a consequence of a half-arsed government policy, even the posh ones. And last week, a projection by the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, suggested that there is a £1 billion “black hole” in the government’s calculations of its likely income from the repayment of student loans because of ludicrous optimism about graduates’ pay in the future. They didn’t think this one through.

I’ve been teaching journalism at various higher education outfits for more than 20 years, and so far there is no sign of any collapse in demand for journalism courses – which is a relief for me but also a concern, because there aren’t many jobs in journalism right now.

Yes, there are opportunities for young journos with the right skills. I’m as committed as ever to getting talented working-class and ethnic-minority kids into the business. My students today are as good as any I’ve had. But I’m worried that the pell-mell expansion of HE journalism training over the past two decades – driven by an extraordinary boom in journalism employment from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s – has gone too far. I had a particularly brilliant group that finished a university course I ran two years ago that I thought would take over Fleet Street: they’ve done well, but they’re mostly not working in journalism. I wouldn’t go as far as a former colleague, who described the journalism training business as “a giant Ponzi scheme”, but we’re training too many journalists today, and that’s not responsible (even if it pays my mortgage).

It’s not quite as ridiculous as pathology, which, as a result of the popularity of TV crime dramas featuring forensic scientists, has seen an increase in the number qualifying as pathologists rising from five 10 years ago to more than 400 – prompting the vice-president of the Royal College of Patholgists, Suzy Lishman, to tell the Times the other week: “If all these young people want a job when they qualify, at least half will have to retrain as mass murderers.”

But the brutal fact is that it is senseless to organise higher education on front-end market demand: particularly with vocational courses, what seems sexy now won’t be so hot in three years. It’s essential to plan ahead with an eye on the employment market.

OK, there will always be a lag and some guesswork, but there is a role for the person in Whitehall who knows better than 18-year-olds who want to be Julian Assange or the star in a TV cop show.

That isn’t, however, the only problem. Just as idiotic as allowing the passing fancies of 18-year-olds to determine the shape of higher education, the way the worth of university teachers and courses is now assessed is a tick-box questionnaire that all undergraduates get before they do their finals, the National Student Survey. A bad NSS is higher-education death – even though it is usually the result of cock-ups and foibles: one lecturer is parachuted in and pitches the lectures too high or low for the students, another is a particularly tough marker, another has a cohort of students he or she fails to enthuse after a badly judged first lecture.

I’ve been all those, and I regret nothing apart from the stupidity of university managements who accept the tick-box questionnaire as the last word. I’ve never handed out over-generous marks to keep students quiet in the NSS, but I know plenty of lecturers that do. The NSS means grade inflation and falling standards.
And it doesn’t empower students a jot.

I know it’s old-fashioned, but what Britain’s universities need now is national planning, professional independence for lecturers and funding from general taxation. Marketisation has been a disaster. It privileges the stupid wannabe and the whinger above all others. Time for a change: politics back in command.

THE EU BUDGET SHOULD GROW

It fits with the unpopularity of all things European among British voters, but the enthusiasm of Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander for cutting the EU budget is a mistake. Europe does need to cut  its subsidies for agriculture, but more importantly it needs a massive increase in it structural funds to develop the infrastructure of its poorest areas (some of which are in Britain). Europe-wide super-big-state top-down Keynesian infrastructure spending could work wonders in bringing the continent out of recession, and that's what Labour should be saying. I really get the sense that they've spent so much time looking at what focus groups are saying that they've completely lost the policy plot.

BLOGGING IS SO NOUGHTIES

It's hardly earth-shattering news, but the Orwell Prize has decided not to award a blogger next year. Its chair, Jean Seaton, explains in a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free website here:

Blogging has evolved so rapidly over the past five years that it is no longer one thing. Many of our shortlisted bloggers have migrated to journalism, writing books and becoming (in ConservativeHome for example) political powers in the land. They have become insiders not outsiders. And as newspapers, periodicals, individual journalists and broadcasting have rapidly converged, everyone is a blogger now. As the press heads online, blogging is dissolving. While there is a community of independent blogging voices, their form has grown up. Blogging is no longer a thing but a glorious bouquet of things.

She's right about how blogging has become part of the mainstream media -- and I know how fraught the process of judging blogs has been for the Orwell Prize, a tiny outfit with minimal resources that puts on dazzling highbrow public events. (The most recent of them was last night's debate at the Frontline Club to launch the 2013 prize, which turned into a multi-expert and extraordinarily frank discussion of Muslim-Asian child sex abuse, though it was billed as being on policing.)

I'm sad, however, that the Orwell Prize has dropped its blog award. I don't have a dog in this race: I've been blogging 10 years but most of what I've posted for the past five is what I've written for dead-trees publications. I've been aware for rather a long time that blogging is firing out missives that will be read by very few people, even if you use Facebook and Twitter to publicise your efforts.

But ... self-publishing online is now established and important even if it ain't what we dreamed of in 2002. The best of it should be rewarded.

A POOR EFFORT

I wasn't exactly waiting with bated breath for David Cameron's Tory conference speech today, but I was expecting something rather better than the boilerplate nonsense he delivered. I'm sure there are a couple of soundbites that can be retrieved for news programmes this evening, but it was a pedestrian performance aimed at the conference hall rather than the electorate, retelling old tales and repeating old tropes. If this was a relaunch, it never even got into orbit. How he can have managed at once to look less managerial than Boris Johnson and less charismatic than Ed Miliband is a source of wonder. Long may it continue.

KILL A BURGLAR, WIN A METRO

It's been back to the eighties at the Tory conference so far. The opinion polls and focus groups show middle-class swing voters angry about immigration, crime and scroungers -- so the Tories are targeting them with some extraordinarily crude messages, the most idiotic of which so far has been Chris Grayling's endorsement of the householder's right to shoot a burglar. This is utterly desperate stuff. "Kill the burglar!" might have made a line in a Smiths' song 30 years ago (it didn't, but it works very well in "Panic" instead of "Hang the DJ"), but it's so removed from everyday life as experienced by most Brits as to be ridiculous as a party policy. Boris Johnson was asinine, and if he's the Tories' best hope they should give up on general elections for 15 years. David Cameron has a big job to rescue this conference from disaster tomorrow.

ABUSE WE MISSED

The story that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile was widespread even in the mid-1970s: I remember being told as a teenager by one of my schoolmates that he had a particular enthusiasm not for young girls but for paraplegic boys -- hence his enthusiastic support for Stoke Mandeville. None of my schoolmates had any media connections, as far as I'm aware, or any direct experience of Savile: the story had spread by word of mouth, and had been improved in the telling, no doubt, throughout teenage Britain. As such it was rumour, and no one could publish without evidence. But it was so pervasive that the failure of the newspapers or broadcasters to investigate -- or to publish or air after investigation -- is quite scandalous. I'm with Suzanne Moore: you can't claim it was simply a matter of different times and different mores. Savile's victims weren't groupies who wanted a piece of the action with the star -- which is maybe stupid and sad but at least consensual -- they were molested by a trusted children's TV presenter who bathed in the star's reflected glory, as Savile himself seems to have known. It's not quite the same as priests abusing kids, but it's in the same territory.

There are excellent pieces from my good comrades Padraig Reidy, Anna Chen, Suzanne Moore, Nick Cohen, Charles Shaar Murray