Just putting more women in the cabinet won't change politics nearly enough

This week David Cameron reshuffled his cabinet, casting several of his ministers into outer darkness and welcoming new faces to the top table, several of which happened to belong to women.

Cue miles of news footage of the likes of Dominic Grieve, David Willets and Ken Clarke among others trooping out of Downing Street trying hard not to look like they were about to go home and kick the cat.

There was also plenty of footage of Nicky Morgan, Liz Truss and Esther McVey marching in the opposite direction faces aglow with anticipation, as the Daily Mail made snide comments about their choice of handbag.

All this was accompanied by an increasingly dour debate over whether or not this meant the end for ‘male, stale and pale’ politicians. I’d say not, even after this so called great leap forward only five out of twenty two cabinet ministers are female; if the sisterhood are storming the citadel they’re doing it in slow motion.

Two big beasts caught a bullet when the herd was culled with William Hague moving from Foreign Secretary to being Leader of the Commons and announcing that he intends to stand down as an MP at the next election, Michael Gove has been moved from being Education Secretary to be the Chief Whip, both events providing more of a surprise than anyone watching might have expected.

The sad truth about reshuffles is that they tend to be more about image than substance, particularly when like this one they come when an election is less than a year away.

The decision by William Hague to bring the curtain down on his political career when he is still, by political standards, a relatively young man prompted much chin stroking over what might have been. If only he hadn’t worn that baseball cap, hadn’t had to face the supernova of charisma that was Tony Blair in his pomp over the despatch box things could have been so different.

It is hard not to imagine a chorus line of geography teachers kicking up their sandals and singing ‘ding dong the witch is dead’ as Michael Gove gets dragged off the stage with a big hook. Hyperactive, obsessed with picking fights with the teaching unions and a fool for any initiative likely to garner a headline he was ultimately too divisive a figure to remain in post any longer. His successor Nicky Morgan would do well to learn by his example and try working with rather than battling against the ‘blob’.

The big story, of course, was David Cameron’s finally coming good (almost) on his promise to ensure a fifth of his cabinet was female, pinstriped paleness is out and all things pastel coloured and progressive is in.

Anything that makes politics less of a club for public schoolboys has to be a good thing, well up to a point anyway. Unfortunately the sense of righteous vindication emanating from Citizen Dave over his own modernity suggests that nothing has really changes, under the progressive veneer political business will go on as usual.

The problem lies in the selection process for MPs of either gender, which is biased towards favouring flinty eyed careerists adept at playing tricksy Westminster games but with little experience of life outside the bubble.

We need more female members of parliament; whether they make it to cabinet level or not; come to that we need more black, disabled and working class MPs too. Having parliament look more like the people it represents isn’t enough though; not nearly enough.

It must contain people who represent to broad sweep of life experience, from academic policy makers to people who have had to make their way using their wits alone. That is the one sure way of ensuring parliament will always do its job through the prism of focusing on the most important of its roles, protecting the rights and liberties that keep us free.

I would be glad if after the next election parliament never mind the cabinet formed by whoever wins is less male, pale and stale than it was before; I’d like it to be less remote, insular and complacent too.

Britain needs the right to strike

Stoke on a sunny Thursday morning in early July, the day when public sector workers across the country went on strike over pay, pensions and working conditions.

The town is a somewhat shabby collection of discount stores, charity shops and empty units; over to the left of where I’m standing they’re building a new hall of residence for students at the nearby Staffordshire university and outside the Wetherspoons at the end of London Road a handful of early drinkers are smoking cigarettes.

This is the sort of place in which the ‘hard working families’ Francis Maude and David Cameron have spent the run-up to the strike saying will be hit hardest by it live; despite the brave talk of recovery from the PM and the man who gave him his first job in politics many of them are struggling to make ends meet. As shoppers amble around me enjoying the sunlight it is hard to discern much sign of the chaotic standstill right wing politicians and their nervous bedfellows at the BBC predicted the strike would cause.

By the time I arrive in Kingsway, the broad tarmacked area outside the Civic Centre the crowd is slowly building. There are stalls representing the unions taking part, GMB, PCS, NUT and alphabet soup of protest; along with ones for the Socialist and Green parties and campaigns by the local branch of the People’s Assembly and people fighting to protect the NHS.

Over the next forty minutes or so the crowd grows to maybe two hundred strong with a distinct carnival atmosphere setting in. More or less everyone seems to know everyone else and old style embroidered union banners mix with shiny paper placards printed out the night before, a young woman wearing a top hat and frock coat wanders past and there are several people in t-shirts with the legend ‘Get Angry And Fight’ printed on them wandering around; subverting in the name of protest the somewhat patronising ‘slogan’ of the recession.

The age range of the participants is wider than often at such events with several families with young children present. One includes a small boy clutching proudly a handwritten placard reading ‘My Daddy is Worth More’, nice to see someone learning the habit of protest early.

Only slightly behind schedule Steve Jones of the North Staffs Trades Council takes to the podium to introduce the speakers, getting in the process a bigger laugh than he probably deserved by holding up a rather withered looks in twig and saying it is another unions branch that has fallen foul of the cuts.

First to speak is Clive Rushton of UNISON, the crowd gives one of the biggest cheers of the day when he addresses them as ‘comrades’, several other speakers will do the same with a similar response. There may be a message there for the handful of Labour councillors watching rather sheepishly from the side-lines, it might be time to embrace rather than hide their party’s working class roots.

He attacks the government for its unwillingness to negotiate with public sector unions and praises the work his members do providing essential services and says the strike is there chance to send a clear message that ‘enough is enough.’

Linda Goodwin of the NUT turns her fire on the demands placed on teachers by ever more stringent OFSTEAD inspections and attacks government plans for performance related pay for teachers as unsuitable since people in education work collaboratively; a sensible point that will probably be lost on busy, publicity chasing Michael Gove.

Colin Griffith of GMB gets another big cheer when he proclaims himself to be ‘working class and proud’, followed by some pantomime boos when he revisits memories of the damage done to heavy industry by the Tory governments of the 1980’s. This time, he says, they’ve got public services in their sights. To strong applause he calls for money to be clawed back from tax avoiders to be used to fund better public services.

Margaret Armstrong of UNITE is equally combative as she says their treatment of public sector workers demonstrates the values of this government, meaning they want to pay the people who deliver essential services poverty wages and then condemn them when they protest. It was time, she said, for working people to ‘pick up their heads, get off their knees and fight back.’

The final speaker of the day is Jason Hill, President of the Trades Council who launches into an impassioned attack on the ‘obscenity’ of the government’s approach to the economy, listing to rising cheers zero hours contracts, benefits reform and privatisation. Austerity, he says, isn’t the way to encourage growth; you do that by rebuilding public services and having a government that is unafraid to stand up for working people.

Then almost as soon as it began the whole thing is over, as the Birmingham Clarion Singers sing political songs old and new people are folding up trestle tables and rolling up banners. All of a sudden we have left behind the elevated plain of demonstration and returned to the everyday world of the school run, bills to pay and moss growing in the lawn.

The strike in Stoke or elsewhere didn’t bring the country grinding to a halt and drive the forces of the market back into the sea, it was never going to. What it did do was articulate the anger of public sector workers doing vital but unglamorous jobs at how they have been treated by the coalition and bubbling away behind their public discontent is that of the silently disgruntled majority who know that whatever the politicians say the recovery hasn’t begun for them.

The question is can a Labour Party so timidly unsure of what and who it represents that it didn’t dare associate itself with the strike offer them an alternative?

Spin shouldn't be allowed to scare the Scots out of independence

I am English, as were my parents and their parents before them; even Jacky Charlton couldn’t get me into anyone else’s team. As such I have mostly avoided expressing an opinion on whether or not Scotland should be independent from the rest of the UK.

Then I turned on the news one morning to hear that J K Rowling had been subjected to a ‘vicious’ attack on Twitter for saying she didn’t agree with the ‘yes’ campaign. My first reaction was that nothing in the silly, playground world of Twitter could ever be truly vicious; my second was that something seems to have gone seriously wrong with what should be one of the defining political debates of our age.

Actually both sides in the debate around independence seem to have spent much of their time behaving like the participants in a Twitter squabble.

The basic arguments seem to be, for the Yes campaign that a vote for independence will lead to the creation of a utopia where the sun always shines, services are delivered free of cost and everything is good all of the time. For the No campaign things are much bleaker, that foolishly cast vote in favour of independence will lead to the sun falling from the sky, perpetual winter and hard times all round.

Needless to say since negatives make for better headlines than positives the media has given a large, maybe unfairly so, section of its space over to various members of the three main parties telling the people of Scotland to keep a tight hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.

If I were a Scot this would make me inclined to vote for independence, largely because it is always better to be on the side of hope, at least it is if you want to world to be a place worth living in.

Independence, were Scotland to gain it in September, would be a difficult option for the Westminster establishment to come to terms with; but not one with which they couldn’t come to terms. Not least because whatever else they may be Alex Salmond and David Cameron are both first of all pragmatists.

Independence would bring problems relating to issues like currency, the new nation’s portion of the UK’s overall national debt and what to do about the oil. Thorny though they are these problems are open to be solved because it would be in the interests of both countries to do so quickly and cleanly.

Where independence could founder, possibly even before it has been achieved, is on those problems that are more intractable because they are linked to expectations. Under Alex Salmond and the SNP the Scots have enjoyed old style social democracy at a time when it is being consigned to the history books over the border.

Salmond is a shrewd man and has used the independence campaign to make the case for Scotland to follow the Scandinavian model with high levels of public services paid for by tax levels to match. This is probably the right choice for the Scots and may well be for the rest of the UK too, but it’s not an easy sell.

The No campaign are banking on most Scots not wanting the higher taxes and levels of state interference in their daily lives involved and aren’t above using scare stories to ram the point home. Even when at the far end of the spectrum these approach the absurd, suggesting that an independent Scotland would be like a miniature North Korea shut off by barbed wire and minefields from its more prosperous neighbour whilst the out of touch leadership cling to a discredited ideology.

Even if this is bonkers there is still the inconvenient fact that if the Yes campaign wins then Scotland will have to negotiate the problems experienced by any newly independent nation. Finding a place in the world, balancing the books and stopping the rosy post- independence glow fading too soon, the good news is that in Alex Salmond they might just have a leader with the guts and political nous to brazen things out in those first difficult years; even so it may be a close run thing.

The truth is it may be too close run; there is a real chance that as with the vote on AV in 2011 negativity could win the day. Not by having the best arguments, but by hammering all the wrong ones so fiercely the No campaign will turn off enough people to win by a narrow margin.

That is what politics has become in one of the most developed countries in the world as it bumbles its way into the second decade of the twenty first century. Not a battle of ideas because there are precious few ideas left, just the insistent whine of an establishment determined to hang onto power.

That’s tragic and dangerous because it holds back progress in favour of the order to which the people who have always held power have become accustomed. What follows on from this is the slow atrophying of our democracy as each government proves to be a little more remote than the last.

I hope that doesn’t happen this time and that the people of Scotland show us all the way by taking their courage in their hands and voting for independence. If they do and it works, as it will, then it will open the way for councils and communities across the country to crawl out from under the Westminster behemoth and demand politics on a more human scale.

Put this on a postcard working with people is the best way to improve our town centres

One day I was walking past the Lancaster Building, one of the iconic landmarks in Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre when I saw what I at first took to be an art installation in one of the empty shops on the ground floor. Such exhibitions are fairly frequent as the owners struggle to find a use for a building that may be iconic, but has no immediate commercial function.

On closer inspection the small cards stuck to the window of the empty shop turned out to be part of a campaign run by the charity Sustrans encouraging people to have their say on how public spaces can be improved. Some of the contributions, particularly those written by people with an unhealthy obsession with pigeons, were weird enough for an art gallery, most though, calling as they did for more independent shops in the town and a better bus station made exemplary good sense.

It would be easy to dismiss this sort of thing as being part of the well meaning but ultimately doomed effort to make the world a nicer place that always gets flattened by the relentless onrush of capitalism. Except that in't really the case, it could actually be the best hope for reviving our town centres and our moribund democracy.

Actually Newcastle has fared better than many towns, there are too many empty shops and litter is a problem; the refurbishments to the outdoor market seem to have been dragging on forever, but things could be very much worse. The Castle Walk shopping development brings trade into the town and the feeling of decline and despair you get in other towns is notably absent.

When I thought later about what might go on my own card another nearby town centre sprang to mind, and it cut a much less happy picture.

Stoke, the town that gave my home city its name is a place where defeat and resignation seem to seep up from the paving stones. The town was marooned by a seventies road development and the arrival of a major supermarket a decade ago has killed many of the smaller retailers.

Now the town is a sad jumble of charity shops, takeaways and bookmakers; the sort of place traffic rushes through on its way to somewhere, anywhere else. My prescription for making the town better would be as follows:

Turn the unused space over many of the shops back into what it originally was, living accommodation, for a town to be truly alive people have to live there not just drive in to work than escape at four thirty.

Revive the dowdy and dying market by renting some of the stalls to students from the nearby Staffordshire University at a reduced rate, who knows a major retail empire might be started from one of them, it has happened before in other towns.

Last of all do something to encourage the town's dozen or so takeaways to use healthier locally sourced ingredients; burgers don't have to be made from reconstituted junk.

None of this is particularly original, the point is though I doubt I's ever have the chance to fill out such a postcard, the powers that be at the Civic Centre would walk barefoot over broken glass to get away from such an idea.

They are fond of running consultations, usually online with a prescribed list of questions, if you're lucky you might even get invited to elaborate on your contribution at an 'event' where some bright young thing from a marketing company writes down what you've said on a flip chart. These are then, I imagine, used to lag to loft at the Civic because they're never seen again.

Consultations by their very nature are corporate exercises, undertaken to confirm a policy position those in charge have already reached. Genuine opinions aren't wanted because they tend to be awkward, contradictory and generally get in the way.

Sustrans though seem to be doing something entirely different, something that is alien to the sensibilities of many people in local and national government; they're actually listening to people. The message they're getting back seems to be that people want ownership of the public spaces they use. They want them to be more accessible, more distinctive and most of all they want to be involved in making the decisions that shape this and other important areas of their lives.

It isn't that the political class don't want to build a better world themselves, they're just determined to go the wrong way about doing so. They seem to be afflicted by the last echo of the old imperial mindset, meaning they see the public as a huddled mass to whom things must be done for their own good and in order to make the world a better place.

This sort of thinking might have had its uses in the nineteenth century, but in the modern age when most people are literate and the internet gives us access to more information than ever before its not just inappropriate; its downright dangerous.

It results in billions of pounds being wasted on projects like building a new Civic Centre in Hanley or ripping up half the countryside to build HS2; elections where only a handful of people vote and the creation of an atmosphere of cynicism about politics in which the extremism of Ukip or worse prospers.

The truth so simple it always seems to elude the clever people who presume to govern us is that you achieve more by working with people than you do by imposing solutions from the top down. If you want to consult an expert about what its like to live in Stoke, talk to someone who has done just that all their life.

The role of government both local and national should be to first facilitate the discussions and compromises that will turn aspirations into reality and then to use its organisational ability and economies of scale to deliver the project.

Quite simple really, at least it is if those in the seats of power can develop the confidence to give we the people our head; they and we might be pleasantly surprised by the result.

A retail report its't a state secret so what have they got to hide

It was only a small story tucked away on the inside pages of Thursday’s Sentinel, it told anyone who read it everything they might need to know about the way our city is governed.

In May of last year the council commissioned a report from consultancy firm WYG into the retail needs of the city, it coast £44,515. The report was completed in March but the council has decided not to release it until an unspecified ‘future date.’

The Sentinel reports that the document may contain suggestions for the controversial City Sentral shopping development on the site of the former bus station in Hanley.

Speaking to the paper a council spokesman said ‘we consider that public interest is more strongly in favour of withholding the report than in releasing it because to release it early, without prior approval from council, would result in information being released into the public domain unnecessarily early before all due debates and discussions about its potential impact can take place.’

Which seems to be a rather torturous way of saying they’d quite like said ‘debates and discussions’ to take place behind closed doors without you or I worrying our fluffy little heads about their outcome. For heaven’s sake it’s a report about shopping, not a state secret; what an earth have they got to hide?

I can pretty much guess what the report might say, something, perhaps, about the need to revive the other five towns, encouraging more small and start-up businesses as part of the process. On the subject of City Sentral it might well suggest that the whole thing is rapidly turning into a money pit gobbling up cash but producing nothing in the way of a tangible result.

You don’t need to hire a costly consultancy firm to tell you any of these things, go down to your local and the regulars stood around the bar will be happy to tell you this and more for the price of a round. Actually given the nature of such things consultants tend to be a bit like the soothsayer to a roman emperor, they keep their reading of the entrails sufficiently vague to allow almost anything to be read into them based on how things turn out.

Why keep it under wraps then, shouldn’t those debates and discussions it is going to prompt be conducted in public? They manifestly should, but unfortunately the council has become caught up in a culture of secrecy and paranoia that is both absurd and dangerous.

Mr Pervez, his cabinet and the unelected council officers who pull their strings much of the time have retreated into a metaphorical bunker, maybe it’s located somewhere under the new Civic Centre, from which they view any criticism as an existential threat.

There is no doubt there would be criticism, lots of it, about the report in question, forty four thousand pounds is a lot of money to be paying to be told things you probably already know. Publication of the report would also rekindle public anger over the council’s continued faith in a City Sentral project that is so far from even beginning the developers have allowed the planning permission for the site to expire.

While we’re at it let’s get hot under the collar over the money being poured into the doomed bid to bring HS2 to Stoke and the £450,000 spent by the council on a display at the Chelsea Flower Show and the £700 a plate dinner for the great and the good they hosted at the same event.

These may seem to be unconnected issues, but they all refer to the same skewed priorities and poor judgement that set the teeth of local people on edge. The council have demonstrably lost touch with the concerns of the people they serve and see themselves as arms-length ‘facilitators’ forever at one remove from the consequences of their action.

This has led to the farcical situation where a council that preaches belt tightening and fiscal restraint when it comes to setting the budget spends like a drunken sailor on its own pet projects. When the inevitable criticism arises the paranoia kicks in and anyone speaking against the view from the bunker is seen as a threat.

Actually public anger at such foolishness is a vital part of the democratic process, it shows that we the public have expectations of our elected officials; the most important of these being that they listen to our concerns.

What Stoke-on-Trent needs after the next election isn’t just to have a smaller and more humble Labour group leading the council and a few new faces and parties in the chamber, although all that would be more than nice. We need a radical and long overdue change to the political mind-set, a form of governance that is conducted in the open and where involving the public in decision making is at the core of the democratic process, not a peripheral to be paid lip service only.

The secret to reviving the moribund political scene in this city might turn out to be having far fewer secrets in the first place.

No more chasing targets Police tell PACT meeting

It’s a little before seven o’clock on a Monday evening and I’m sitting in a lecture theatre at the Medical Institute in Hartshill waiting for this month’s PACT meeting to start. The surroundings are a little cramped with walls painted in a suitably clinical shade of white, for a wet night the crowd is surprisingly good.

PACT meetings bring together residents associations, the police, the council and other groups to discuss issues relating to a specific area. The meeting I attended covered the Penkhull, Hartshill and Basford areas.

The speakers included Inspector Ian Hancock of Staffordshire Police and Simon Anderson Chief Officer of the Staffordshire Police Special Constabulary. Also speaking were Christine Wilshaw and Cheryl Harding of Staffordshire Victim Support giving an overview of the service the charity delivers locally and promoting its open day taking place at Winton House in Shelton on 16th June.

Speaking about the performance of Staffordshire Police over the past year Inspector Hancock said the force had ‘moved away’ from chasing targets and instead adopted three clear objectives, preventing crime, providing outstanding service and dealing with what matters to communities.

This more straightforward regime had led to reductions in burglaries and vehicle crime and a rise in reporting of violent and sexual crimes, with a rise in the latter area in the reporting of historic crimes due to media coverage of the issue.

The force was, he said, implementing a ‘robust’ reporting and follow up system and working hard to identify crime hotspots, they were also mounting ‘high visibility’ patrols to reassure the public in areas identified. They were also refining their systems for deploying officers and working with the council, the NHS and other services to reduce crime.

As a result, said Inspector Hancock, people in Staffordshire are amongst the most satisfied with the service they receive from the police in the country.

In his open necked shirt and designer glasses Inspector Hancock was the very figure of the modern senior police officer, peppering his speech with management speak and projecting an image of approachable competence. The policies he was describing though seemed to be rooted in a desire to make the police more responsive to public concerns.

Chief Officer Anderson cut a different and more traditional figure, all epaulettes and a starched white shirt worn with a tie and a peaked cap placed neatly on the lectern as he spoke. If the previous speaker had, probably subconsciously, been projecting an image not dissimilar to that of the CEO of an internet start-up, this one resembled nothing so much as a house master at a minor public school.

He gave, using a suitably traditional power-point presentation, a brief overview of the role of the special constabulary in Staffordshire. This challenged the inaccurate public perception of the specials as at best ‘hobby Bobbies’ and at worst an anachronism, highlighting the extent to which they are fully integrated into every part of the policing role.

He also stressed the important role specials play in engaging with the public, after all as volunteers they often live in the communities they police. This would seem to be an ideal solution to providing the high visibility local policing the public desire without incurring extra costs at a time when budgets are tight.

PACT meetings are a rare example of how the police, the council and other agencies can engage with the public effectively, mostly because they are controlled by the community and respond to the priorities they have identified. The high quality of speakers attending this and other such meetings suggest that slowly, very slowly in many cases, the message that connecting with the community matters is getting through.

Ukip pose the biggest threat to a Labour Party that still doesn't know what it stands for

This has been a good weekend for Nigel Farage and Ukip; and a truly awful one for the political establishment.

In the British local elections everyone’s most, or least depending on your perspective, band of rebels gained dozens of seats and would have had 17% of the vote nationally if the result were replicated in a general election.

Ukip dis equally well in the European election held over the weekend, again they gained seats, pushing the Tories into third place and contributed to the near annihilation of the Liberal Democrats.

All of a sudden a fringe party are starting to look like players somewhere other than in the sometimes overheated rhetoric of their leader. This has prompted much chin stroking and not a little knee trembling in the corridors of power.

The people have spoken; the scoundrels, but what can it all mean? What indeed, here’s my take.

Ukip have two key advantages over the three main UK parties. The most obvious is Farage himself, like or loathe him he’s one of the few of the current crop of politicians with what might be called the ‘common touch.’ His cheeky chappie who likes a beer and tweaking the nose of pompous officials in Brussels or Westminster act, and it is assuredly an act, has been devastatingly effective.

They have another advantage too and that is they are selling the simplest message in politics, ‘we are against’, what they’re against seems dependent on the individual candidate and the conditions on the ground since they seem to operate more like a franchise than a party.it has allowed them to tap into the powerful wellspring of public concerns about issues liken immigration or the EU.

On occasion thus has led them into some dangerous territory, more than one candidate has had to be quietly removed for making comments that are at best ill-informed and at worst openly racist within hearing of the press. This should have been damaging, yet somehow Farage has managed to dribble the debate around such obstacles like a gifted winger with the ball at his feet.

At one level Ukip, whether they explicitly wish to or not, provide an outlet for the sizeable chunk of the electorate who are ill at ease with multi-culturalism, but fear being identified with the overtly racist BNP. Here instead is a party that allows them to cloak their prejudices behind a fantasy of returning Britain to some arcadia where tea is served at four, there’s cricket on the village green and old ladies cycle to evensong through the mist. It is, of course, twaddle and quite dangerous twaddle too.

The rise of Ukip has been awkward for the Tories, tempting them back into the morass of squabbling over Europe that destroyed John Major’s government in the nineties. It could though be utterly disastrous for Labour, providing a focus for discontent in ex-industrial cities the party has taken for granted for far too long.

It is here not in the leafy Home Counties that concerns over the shortage of jobs, crumbling public services and immigration are most acute. A feeling that is fed by a tabloid press that is almost exclusively right wing and thrives on moral panics and disinformation, in the resulting din the message that Tory economic policies not Eastern European immigrants or the EU are to blame for people’s misfortunes gets drowned out.

Ed Milliband has already been criticised for running a poor campaign in the local and European elections and being generally out of touch with the grassroots of his party and its core vote. Not without good cause, the campaign, much like his tenure as leader has been a farrago of pratfalls and missed opportunities.

The party political broadcast put out by Labour as part of the campaign serves as an example of just how dire things were. Shot in Black and white (ooh arty) it contained every cliché about the coalition presented with the archly smug self-satisfaction with its own brilliance of a sixth form revue. Even for a moribund genre with no audience this marked a stylistic nadir.

What it didn’t contain was the one thing it most needed to, namely some hint of how Britain might be different under a Labour government. This is because after four years in opposition and countless initiatives and consultations the party still has no idea.

A poor showing in Europe and the local elections probably won’t unseat Ed Milliband as leader, not yet anyway, none of his rivals are keen to take over the ship just as the electoral iceberg hoves into view. It will though be one more charge on the rap sheet against him when the recriminations start in May 2015.

This will hold back the important and inevitably painful discussion the party must have about what it stands for and who it seeks to represent. If his unavoidable demise is a return to the Blairite project of being a washed out pink version of the Tories then they might as well be consigned to the vault marked nineties tat and forgotten.

If the success of Ukip has been based on the simplistic message of ‘we’re against’ then Labour and the left in general need to work harder and more courageously at selling a message of their own. Not just articulation what they’re against, but being brave enough to say what they’re for; that socialism isn’t a dirty word or a dead idea, it a means of creating a fairer society.

Ukip rose from nowhere and will soon enough sink back into obscurity, the worst thing about being the poster boys for anything is that sooner or later someone new comes along to take your place. The left needs to be braver in putting forward its alternative because whatever does may well be worse.